Elly Blue | Gristhttp://grist.org
We're an online news organization that uses humor to interpret green issues & inspire environmental action.Fri, 09 Dec 2016 15:26:20 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/330e84b0272aae748d059cd70e3f8f8d?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngElly Blue | Gristhttp://grist.org
Tis the season … for road ragehttp://grist.org/biking/2011-12-07-tis-the-season-for-road-rage/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-12-07-tis-the-season-for-road-rage/#respondWed, 07 Dec 2011 18:54:45 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-12-07-tis-the-season-for-road-rage/]]>Nothing says, “Happy Holidays,” like …Photo: Mikey WallyMichelle Poyourow, a transportation consultant in Portland, Ore., decided to ride down Hawthorne Blvd. for just a block. She was already on the defensive — it was a busy, fast road, and she was wearing a short skirt that day. Then it happened:

“A big SUV came by and the asshole in the front seat barked at me like a dog out the window. I gave him the finger at close range, and turned and looked just in time to see that the guy in the front seat was … a dog. A big, slobbery, loving golden retriever. Sounded so much like a drunk frat boy, you wouldn’t believe it.”

Road rage is something we all succumb to. Even mild-mannered transportation wonks. Even Zen Buddhists. But the middle finger is a force multiplier — deploying it can ruin your day, not to mention that of its recipient, no matter how deserving he or she may have been.

It always seems to get worse during the winter holidays, when everyone on the road is more preoccupied, hurried, distracted, drunk, or just plain angry than usual. December is a quantifiably stressful time of year. Families are getting together. Relationships are breaking up. Events, shopping, and schedules mean time management is strained to the breaking point. And alcohol is flowing freely. It shows on the road.

When tempers flare on the streets, people on bicycles are inarguably more vulnerable than those in cars. But though we have every incentive to keep road rage incidents from escalating, we’re still human and thus still prone to the kind of fear that spurs angry actions and reactions.

I’m certainly no angel when I decide someone is driving thoughtlessly or aggressively near me. Other people probably handle it better, I figured, so I put out a call to see how other two-wheeled travelers preserve their calm and sanity in a pinch. I got a lot of shrugged shoulders and responses like “I just get mad.”

There were some creative variants on the middle finger, though: “I’m not sure if this is constructive or not, but I like to give the thumbs down so they know they need to do something different,” tweeted Angela Dube, a graduate student who relies on her bicycle to get around San Jose, Calif.

The best strategy of all seems to be not engaging. But it can take a Herculean effort — or perhaps the right incentives.

Zak Schwank, a full-time dad in Temecula, Calif., a small city that he describes as “not the most bike friendly,” has the ultimate reason to not succumb to road rage — he rides with his three kids, ages 1 to 8, on his cargo bike.

“When I bike solo,” he told me in an email, “I usually lose my cool quite quick.” But when he rides with his kids, he feels compelled to do things differently.

“Obviously when something happens with a motorist it can be quite scary,” he says. “The first thing I do is make sure that we are all safe. I try my best to remain calm. The blood gets flowing, but in reality this is a huge teaching moment for my family. I want my kids to grow up and be responsible, respectable adults. Cursing and yelling at motorists isn’t something I want to teach them … they’ll learn that on their own, I’m sure.”

In these situations, Schwank tries not to engage, even politely, he says. “I’ve found that talking to people only leads to more aggression.”

I find it embarrassingly difficult to follow Schwank’s lead and not participate in road rage. But on days when I’m determined to not react and to simply go about my day no matter what, my road calm seems to have a multiplying effect as well, bringing out the best in everyone, as though the world were full of friendly golden retrievers instead of the drunk frat boys of my pessimistic imagination.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-12-07-tis-the-season-for-road-rage/feed/0middle-finger-bike-flickr-mikey-wally-180x150.jpgMiddle finger. A gift guide to bike stuff that people actually wanthttp://grist.org/biking/2011-11-30-a-gift-guide-to-bike-stuff-that-people-actually-want/
Wed, 30 Nov 2011 23:44:39 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-11-30-a-gift-guide-to-bike-stuff-that-people-actually-want/]]>Photo: Adams CarrollI’m not going to hate on shot glasses with bikes on them or leather holsters for carrying wine bottles by bicycle, but if you want to give someone a bicycle-related gift this holiday season that is actually useful on a daily basis, this guide is for you. I’ll start small and build from there.

No-budget gifts

I’m a fan of these. If you’ve got wrenching skills, offer to fix your pal’s basic bike problems, like flat tires or out-of-whack derailleurs. If they’re interested in bike commuting but are feeling some trepidation about the idea, offer to be their riding buddy, advise them on clothes and basic riding skills, or go for a weekend test ride.

The little things

Wool socks: A cozier — and sexier — way to bike through the winter.Looking for stocking stuffers, presents for your three dozen cousins, or something for all the days of Hanukkah? Check out your local bike shop for these sure bets:

It’s difficult to have too many bike lights. They’re always getting lost or loaned to a friend to ride home from a late dinner party. There’s an unbelievable variety out there, but you can find some of the better representatives of each type here.

Wool socks are nicer for riding in the rain and cold than synthetic performance bicycling socks. Start your search here and continue into the uncharted reaches of woolen underlayers here.

If you are getting a gift for someone who regularly uses a cable lock to “secure” their bicycle, the most valuable gift you can give them is the gift of keeping their bicycle un-stolen — with a far more theft-proof u-lock.

Made right here

A handy u-lock holster, made locally in Philly.There’s a growing cottage industry in homegrown bike craft in this country — and it’s not relegated to Oregon, Seattle, the Bay Area, and Brooklyn. You can now buy custom messenger bags in Ohio, cycling caps in Nebraska, u-lock holsters in Philadelphia, and lots more. Check out this listing of bike crafters all over the world.

And if your gift recipient knows how to work a sewing machine, why not empower them to make some gear at home? Pair this cycling cap sewing pattern with a yard of cool fabric. You might help launch the next basement bike start-up.

Get your fix

Does your giftee have a bike that they might ride more often (or at least more joyously) if the squeaks and bumps were ironed out? Give them a gift certificate to a local shop for a tune-up. Better yet, give them a book on bike maintenance so they can do repairs on their own. I learned from Zinn and the Art of Road Bike Maintenance and The Chainbreaker Bike Book, but there are many other good options.

The gift of adventure

Do you dream of going on a bike tour with your bestie or significant other? Warm them up to the idea with Barbara Savage’s classic travelogue, Miles from Nowhere, the inspiring story of a two-year, around-the-world bike tour Savage took with her husband. Or maybe your friend is ready to start poring over these cross-country U.S. bike maps and rounding up his touring gear.

Support the cause

Give your favorite biker a membership with her local bicycle advocacy organization or activist group — or make a donation in their name to their favorite bike blogger. If there is none, choose a national organization like the lobbying group Transportation for America or Streetfilms, an outfit that has created an advocacy toolbox of short movies from around the world.

If your loved one is new to biking, proceed with caution and sensitivity. The nation’s garages already hold plenty of dusty bikes that either represent the dreams of the spouse they don’t belong to or the fears of the one to whom they do.

My suggestion: Take them on a weekend getaway where you can rent bikes and cruise around on mellow streets and trails. It’s a thoughtful gift, you’ll both have a blast, and the experience will help them figure out what they do and do not want out of a bike.

Then, go down to your friendly local bike shop. Steer clear of the big box stores. A true parable of the American Dream, the bikes they tout are irresistibly affordable yet tend to fall apart faster than they can be maintained.

If your giftee is an old hand at cycling, that’s another story. Just ask them to describe their dream bike — and be ready with a pen to write down the detailed description. Then head for the afore-mentioned local shop.

If you have several thousand dollars to spare, thrill them beyond reason by commissioning them a custom bike from your local frame builder. If your budget is more modest, find a local outfit that will powder coat their beloved but rusty old ride to whatever fresh new color scheme they desire.

“Balance bikes” help little kids practice for the real thing.Bikes for kids

If you think adult bikes on the big box market are bad, kids’ bikes are worse, even at regular bike shops. The exception is “balance bikes” for toddlers — pedal-less alternatives to trikes or training wheels. Younguns push themselves along with their feet and learn to balance on two wheels, saving a lot of scraped knees when they make the transition to a pedal bike.

You tell me

What bikey gifts do you recommend? Is there a burgeoning bike craft scene near you? Tell us all about it in the comments section below.

1. I’m thankful for the power of bikes to enable people-powered protest movements. Bicycles have been playing a supporting role in the Occupy movement, and seem to be bringing out the best in everyone, whether used by protesters or police.

2. Free bicycles are on the rise, thanks to an international network of bike collectives. Chances are there’s one near you — find out on this list — where you can build yourself a bike and learn to do your own repairs. Or, to see an economic multiplier at work, donate money, parts, or time to a bike collective that provides free bicycles to teens or adults with low incomes.

3. Hooray for fenders! Riding through a light drizzle is a secret pleasure of mine, and if I had to choose between a raincoat and fenders, I’d choose fenders every time. After all, the rain is far cleaner coming down than it is when it’s tossed back up by your tires.

4. I love the energy of small cities with big visions. As the giants like New York and Seattle wrangle over relatively small amounts of bike infrastructure, people in smaller cities around the country, from Oklahoma City to Newton, Mass., are seeing the appeal of bicycle transportation — and can have a much quicker road to revising their infrastructure and habits.

5. There is a 325-mile continuous paved trail on which you can bike, hike, or ski between Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh. It’s called the Great Allegheny Passage. How cool is that?

6. Let’s hear it for sharrows and bike lanes. Cycling advocates argue fiercely about what kind of bike infrastructure is most effective, but the truth is that every time any kind of bike markings go down it’s a giant, sometimes bright green billboard reminding all of us that bicycles belong on the road.

7. Sure, we need paint on the roads and slower speed limits, but art is what makes life worth living. That’s why I appreciate Artcrank, a Minneapolis-based group that travels from city to city commissioning bike-themed posters from local artists and selling them at fun, beery parties that build community and micro-boost the local economy.

8. I still get a little swoony every time I see someone ride past on a cargo bike, chatting with their kids or balancing a lopsided load of lumber. And I love that the cargo bike options in North America are expanding fast. You can buy an expensive imported box bike or an artisanal, U.S.-made variant for less than the price of a cheap car. You can go budget and convert your bike into an Xtracycle longtail. Or you can hunker down in your garage and build the franken-cargo bike of your dreams out of cast-off parts.

9. The bicycle industry has been slow to turn its gaze from sports to transportation, and even slower to take up advocating for safer streets. But here are exceptions, and many are local bike shop owners like Matt Feiner of The Devil’s Gear in New Haven, Conn. On the big business end, industry titans Trek and SRAM lead the charge, throwing their considerable weight behind the advocacy, research, and infrastructure-building efforts of powerhouse nonprofit Bikes Belong.

10. What’s not to love about food carts? They’re the ideal bike fuel stop. No need to lock up your bike, wrestle with your raingear, bags, and blinky lights — just roll up to the window and order your burrito, pho, or hot chai. They’re more convenient than a fast food drive-thru, but owned by someone who probably lives down the street from you and is buying food from local sources.

11. I’m thankful that Critical Mass and similar rides are still regularly bringing people together to occupy some of the worlds’ most hostile and exclusive public spaces by bike — like this 5,000 person-strong ride in Guadalajara.

12. There’s an uptick in the number of people out there bicycling long distances in search of adventure or to promote a cause. I’m extra inspired by two enthusiastic gals named Sarah and Toni recently completed their Sustainable Cycles Bike Tour down the West Coast, giving out a whole bunch of reusable menstrual cups (the existence of which are also worth a healthy dose of thankfulness) along the way.

13. To the guy sweeping glass out of the bike lane in front of his house as I rode past the other day: Thank you!

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-11-23-wheely-wheely-thankful/feed/0turkeybike_flickr_iamos-carousel.jpgBike.Sharing time: Tracking the ‘sharrow’ on city streetshttp://grist.org/biking/2011-11-17-sharing-time-tracking-the-sharrow-on-city-streets/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-11-17-sharing-time-tracking-the-sharrow-on-city-streets/#commentsThu, 17 Nov 2011 19:06:08 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-11-17-sharing-time-tracking-the-sharrow-on-city-streets/]]>A sharrow in Baltimore. Photo: Elly BlueVisiting Seattle last weekend, it was impossible not to notice that its streets are absolutely covered in sharrows. “It’s almost like they polluted the streets with them,” said Tom Fucoloro, proprietor of the Seattle Bike Blog, who took me on a walk through the city’s Central District, pointing out its transportation features.

A “sharrow” — the word is an amalgamation of “arrow” and “share the road” — is a larger-than-life thermoplastic symbol of a bicycle topped by two chevrons pointing the way forward. More technically known as “shared lane markings,” they’re intended to remind two-wheeled and four-wheeled road users alike to share with each other, and also to encourage people on bikes to take the lane when it’s too narrow to ride side-by-side with car traffic.

Sharrows have been increasing in popularity nationwide, and got a boost in 2009 when they were officially entered into the federal transportation engineering canon. Seattle got a head start, writing them into its 2007 Bike Master Plan. Other cities began earlier, but I’ve never seen such a profusion as in the Emerald City.

Like many experts on transportation bicycling, Fucoloro wasn’t enthusiastic about them. Sharrows are spread so indiscriminately on Seattle streets, he said, that “they mean nothing now.” He has noticed that there seems to be “slightly less aggression” from drivers when they’re in place. “But does that mean all the streets without sharrows are worse?”

In other words, with sharrows everywhere, do drivers assume that cyclists don’t belong on streets without them?

Fucoloro is not the only one to express that concern, but he and others seem to be watching and waiting as cities feel out how best to use them. Some early adopters, including Sacramento and Baltimore, initially put sharrows on busy roads all the way to the right, where riders would be squeezed between fast car traffic and parked cars — right in the dreaded “door zone.” Federal regs now say that sharrows must be at least four feet from the curb if there’s no parking, 11 feet from the curb if there is.

Seattle has its own brand of sharrow growing pains. Riding and walking around town, it’s hard to see a logic to the streets chosen for sharrow treatment. Some are on relatively quiet back streets, others are on breathtakingly fast arterials where the symbols are worn and rutted by the daily flow of cars and trucks speeding over them.

Sharrows are popular because they are politically easy — you can almost hear city officials sigh with relief when sharrows are mentioned. On the surface, they seem like a way to please the increasingly vocal bike lobby without ruffling feathers by putting in a bike lane at the expense of car parking or traffic lanes, which are often perceived as being for cars only. And they’re cheap: Sharrows cost only $229 each to install, including labor and materials, while a full-blown bike lane can cost between $5,000 and $60,000 per mile.

But do sharrows work? One recent study says sharrows slow car traffic slightly, and make bicyclists a little safer. But they are even better at keeping drivers at a distance from parked cars — once again, bike infrastructure benefits more than just people on bikes.

Fucoloro’s conclusion about sharrows: “They’re better as wayfinding signs” rather than safety tools.

Portland’s take on the sharrow meme bears this theory out. Last summer, my hometown experienced a sudden sharrow explosion, as an influx of federal stimulus money was used in part to paste them en masse on an extensive network of low-traffic, neighborhood streets in our northeast quadrant. Laid out smack in the middle of the road, they’re meant to show all road users where people on bikes can ride most safely — but in practice their main usefulness has been to map out bikeable routes across town.

And this, Fucoloro said, points the way to sharrow’s ultimate future, at least in Seattle. They are helping pave the way, politically and on the ground, for the next big thing: neighborhood greenways — designated networks of residential streets that ease walking and biking by discouraging fast car traffic and calming areas where pedestrians cross streets.

“We have a lot of busy streets separating schools and parks, and there’s a need for families and kids to have a safe way to get around,” Fucoloro explained. Greenways fulfill this need. Neighborhood groups have been demanding them, he said, and “lots of them aren’t bikers at all.”

A recent ballot measure in Seattle would have raised car registration fees by $60 per year to fund active transportation projects, including thousands of dollars a year in neighborhood greenways, Fucoloro said. But the initiative was defeated.

“I think the city was going to take bike infrastructure to the next level, and Prop 1 was going to give us a push,” Fucoloro said. “Now I don’t know what we’re going to do — we’ll just keep half-assing it, I guess.”

Half-assed or not, sharrows are a feasible right-now hack for Seattle’s — or any other city’s — streets in a time when the mere mention of bicycle transportation in a public forum can produce an upswell of anti-bike grumbling and threats of vehicular violence. Done wrong or inconsistently, they can make streets slightly more dangerous for bicycling. Done right, they can point the way to the future.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-11-17-sharing-time-tracking-the-sharrow-on-city-streets/feed/6bike-bicycle-sharrow-flickr-elly-blue.jpgBike sharrow.The last rider: Learning to win on a 100k bike ridehttp://grist.org/biking/2011-11-09-the-last-rider-learning-to-win-on-a-100k-bike-ride/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-11-09-the-last-rider-learning-to-win-on-a-100k-bike-ride/#respondWed, 09 Nov 2011 19:03:12 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-11-09-the-last-rider-learning-to-win-on-a-100k-bike-ride/]]>David from Eugene passes a decaying farmouse on the Verboort Populaire.Photo: Elly Blue“I think the rain is really good for us as cyclists,” said my friend Maria Schur. We were in her car, headed to the Verboort Populaire, an annual 100-kilometer (about 62-mile) bicycle ride west of Portland, Ore. “It’s good for character development. It’s okay to do stuff that’s hard.”

As someone who’s used to seeing bicycling in the rain as a necessary evil, I was less philosophical about my choice to spend this November Saturday out in the elements. I didn’t know what to expect from the ride — or, more accurately, the randonée — except that it was not a race, that we would each be on our own, and that I was not in any kind of physical condition to pedal for six and a half hours straight. In the rain. My secret plan was to skip half the route.

Randonneuring is a good-natured, old-world tradition from the early days of cycling. Its deep roots are proudly evident in participants’ allegiance to French terminology and the metric system and an intensely detailed structure of rules and organization. Randonées are about camaraderie, not competition. They are strictly timed, though, with various checkpoints, called controls, along the route. Riders must complete each section of the course by the cutoff time, or their cards are not stamped and their results are not entered into the randonneuring recordbooks that have been kept in Paris since the 1920s.

Saturday’s outing was just for fun, a “populaire,” intended to introduce the sport to new suckers like me. The shortest rides that earn you a place in the Parisian books are twice as long, 200-kilometer (124-mile) “brevets” that take from eight to 12 hours to complete. Once you complete a brevet, you’re officially a randonneur, and are free to enjoy the 300-, 400-, 600-, and ultimately the big 1200-kilometer (746-mile), 90-hour rides such as the famous Paris-Brest-Paris.

On this day, 59 hopefuls started out, over twice the number of people expected turned out to give the art of randonneuring a try. It was a chatty, ragtag bunch, sporting every degree of cycling apparel from old and rugged to slick and new. The event was organized by volunteers, and the total cost to participate was $2.

Photo: Elly BlueAt 9 a.m., we were let loose into the chilly drizzle. For the first 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), a steady stream of yellow-rainjacketed riders passed me with friendly chimes and hellos. With each, I felt the edges of my ego fray a little. Race or not, I was acutely aware of my need to prove myself. I contemplated my slow bike, my slow body, the years it had been since I rode more than 20 or 30 miles in a day. I decided that I would finish the ride no matter what. I decided what to call this column.

At the end of those first 10 kilometers was a checkpoint at a coffee shop. Its keeper was Theo Roffe, one of the ride organizers, who rubberstamped my ride card to prove I’d been there. I confided my working title to him. “I’d like to interview that person,” I said, “but it will probably be me.”

“In France they say la lanterne rouge,” he said. “The caboose.” (The literal translation is “the red lantern,” and it was, for years, an honor bestowed upon the last-place finisher in the Tour de France.)

“That’s me!” I pointed to my bright red saddlebag.

“Naw.” He shook his head. “There are a ton of people behind you. You won’t be last.”

Thus reassured, I was free to accept that being last would be okay. Mostly. And I finally noticed the world outside my head: the giant Vs of migrating birds, the farms and mountains receding into the fog, the occasional truck zooming past, the clean smell of the air.

For the next 84 kilometers (52 miles), I just rode. Mostly, I was alone. The rain intensified. My left foot went numb and then my right. People passed me, but not as many as early on. A few slowed down to chat for a kilometer before disappearing around a bend. My legs were turning to Jell-O, albeit frozen Jell-O, and I felt increasingly obliged to stop and take photos of every sheep and horse.

Our cue sheets warned us that this was our last chance to fill up our water bottles.Photo: Elly BlueI hit the final checkpoint, an empty crossroads that had once been the town of Snoozeville, just at the cutoff time, to be met by a friendly high five from Ed Groth, another of the day’s organizers. He poured me a cup of hot chocolate, initialed my card, and started packing up. (The next day I learned that he had ridden all the way there from Portland with a canopy, table, propane stove, coffee pots, vegan sausage fixings, and plentiful snacks in his cargo bike. It took him five hours each way.)

My friend April Wiza rolled up around the same time. As she gulped down coffee, we decided to continue together. We chatted and joked on the flat stretches, soaring down the hills silently and cursing our way up the next ones. Soon I forgot to feel tired and uncomfortable.

I might just finish this, I thought, as we ground up a particularly long and steep hill 10 kilometers from the finish. April was dropping behind — was I getting my second wind? No, she had a puncture and a slow leak. She pumped up her tire, we rode for another kilometer, and she stopped again. “Go on, you don’t have to wait for me,” she said.

The cutoff was creeping up on us. I thought about jumping back on my bike and making a go of the final stretch. But all those frayed bits of my competitive soul had been lathed away somewhere on the road behind us. I leaned my bike against a mailbox and stood there feeling appreciative that the rain had stopped and enjoying the way the grey mist around us brought out the yellows in the fields.

The small crew still waiting for us at the finish ran out with hugs and congratulations. I felt elatedly victorious, thrilled just to be done. Then came the unexpected news that we were just under the wire — “You made it by three minutes!” said Theo Roffe, who had told me about la lanterne rouge at the first check point.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-11-09-the-last-rider-learning-to-win-on-a-100k-bike-ride/feed/0biking-countryside-elly-blue-180x150.jpgBiking past an old farmhouseBikers in rain jackets.The Last Waterin' HoleLocavore-dom taken to the extreme — by bikehttp://grist.org/biking/2011-11-02-locavore-dom-taken-to-the-extreme-by-bike/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-11-02-locavore-dom-taken-to-the-extreme-by-bike/#respondWed, 02 Nov 2011 18:01:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-11-02-locavore-dom-taken-to-the-extreme-by-bike/]]>Photo: MetrofietsI stepped out onto my front porch one day this summer just in time to see my farmer pedaling down the street with a trailer full of tools.

To an outsider, such a vision must seem like a sketch right out of Portlandia, the television show that spoofs my hometown’s supposedly eccentric ways. Here in real-world Portland, however, it’s a normal sight. The farm from which I get most of my vegetables, aptly named Sidewalk’s End, is one of several local examples of something called “dispersed urban agriculture.” Rather than farming all in one place, the two young farmers who run Sidewalk’s End, Holly Mills and Caitlin Arnold, cultivate five urban backyards around southeast Portland. To get from one to the next, they often use bikes.

I subscribed to their CSA (community-supported agriculture) program this summer because the pickup point is an easy one-mile bike ride from my house. I paid an annual fee for my share of the farm’s harvest. Other CSA members get their food in exchange for letting Mills and Arnold farm in their yards. One yard is entirely planted with garlic; another is a seed testing site.

It would be easy to take farming by bike as a sign that dear old Portland has jumped the (locavore) shark. I called up Mills to ask about the hows and whys of bike farming.

It turns out that being green is, as I suspected, behind every decision made at Sidewalk’s End, Mills said, from their dispersed urban model to the sturdy “apocalypticrops” they grow.

Biking is no exception. Strictly eating food from 100 or 50 miles away, as many in Portland’s burgeoning local food movement do, “is a lot more awesome than shipping it from another hemisphere,” Mills said. “But even shipping it 50 miles in a truck every week — that’s a lot of fuel.”

Sidewalk’s End’s unconventional methods have proven to make good economic sense, and not just from a marketing perspective.

“If I was going to start a farm in the traditional way,” Mills explained, “I probably would have started with a saved-up nest egg and spent a year building the infrastructure.” Instead, the farmers launched their operations with $1,000 — not even enough to invest in a reliable truck.

“We looked at the resources we already had,” Mills said. “We’re scrappy and have a lot of energy and ride bikes and are already good at moving a lot of stuff around by bike. We get things for free on Craigslist or from dumpsters or for trade. As young farmers with very few resources, it made sense to start where we lived” — in the city rather than the country — “and with the infrastructure we already had.”

Their skimping has paid off. Sidewalk’s End has “totally broken even” both years, Mills said, with the farmers earning enough to cover all their expenses for the season and having the same amount saved up to cover the next season. These costs don’t include labor — both farmers work other jobs for money. But if all goes as planned, they’ll be able to pay themselves sooner than if they’d started out with a lot of debt.

That isn’t to say that the path they’ve chosen is easy. “The transportation is definitely a logistical work in progress,” Mills said, requiring high levels of organization and efficiency. To organize it all, she said, “I do lists. Lots of lists. I have a map in my head — it’s kind of like a video game. This garden is on the way to this other garden, and I need to get here early to water and then on to another place to prune and then another one to weed. It’s very thrilling.”

Even so, Sidewalk’s End is in the market for a truck. “This fall, we are starting a new garden, which means building a sheet mulch, which means a lot of manure,” Mills said. “I don’t know how I would do that without a truck unless we were able to generate all our own compost — which we don’t have room for yet.”

Mills and Arnold are not giving up on their bikes, though. Mills plans to attend a bike building workshop this year so she can craft a bamboo cargo bike better suited to carrying loads of tools and compost.

They’ve learned a lot in two years and plan to ease their logistics by making their operations even more local. Mills hopes that extra outreach efforts will enable them to consolidate their plots to a more neighborhood scale, closer to their home. Their operations are very much a work in progress. “There are other farmers that have done the bike farming more efficiently than we do,” Mills said, “and I’m really curious about how they do that.”

Mills and Arnold are among those working out an alternative agricultural model, one that relies on backyards instead of mega-corporations. The strength of this big vision, though, is in its small scale and slow growth. “We can’t try and act like we’re a big farm, ’cause we aren’t,” Mills said. “We move slowly and can only carry so many things and can’t buy and build a lot of infrastructure.

You know, the ones who are giving us all a bad name, the ones who think we’re above the law, who regularly pass through stop signs without stopping — even without slowing down very much. I even ran a red light or two in my younger, brasher days.

Well, scofflaw that I am, I do get yelled at plenty. Drivers hate me! And they have every right to — after all, as they are careful to roll down their windows and snarl or shout, with some degree of profanity — I am *not on the sidewalk.*

Yep, that’s right. It’s not running stop signs that gets me yelled at. I raise public ire — at least once a week, even in bike-friendly Portland — only when I do something that’s totally, mundanely legal. I’ll explain.

My egregious behavior at intersections, despite its openness, regularity, and the potential expense of racking up $242 tickets, is largely ignored by fellow road users, including the ones with flashing lights on their cars. Until a recent mini-media-flurry surrounding running red lights, the issue hadn’t come up in the local media in over a year. I was beginning to think I was off the hook for good.

But since it’s back, How do I get away with this unruly behavior? Because, let’s face, it, it’s unremarkable. I ride my bike in the same way that I drive a car, and that most people drive, ride, or walk: predictably, considerately, and holding safety as a higher priority than the law.

More specifically, I take Gandhi’s exhortation to “be the change you want to see” to heart and behave as though the Idaho stop law, that paragon of reasonability that allows people on bicycles to treat stop signs as though they were yield signs, already existed in Oregon. I prefer to focus on the action rather than the inaction, the positive rather than the negative, so I simply call it “yielding.”

Here is what intelligent yielding means: At any given intersection, regardless of signage, I slow down and look around. If there is someone waiting to cross the street on foot, or if another bicycle or a car has the right of way, I come to a complete stop with my foot on the ground. If none of these things is happening, I go on ahead. This video describes it well.

Rolling through stop signs is something each of you dear readers does every day, whether you drive, bike, walk, or jog. Pay attention tonight when you’re out and about — you’ll notice that you don’t stop completely and count to three before proceeding, like you were taught in driver’s ed.

But your yielding behavior works. Yes, there are people out there — in cars or on bikes — who yield badly or not at all. And there are streets where yielding conventions are broken. (Many busy arterials, for instance, fail to provide cues for people in cars to yield to people walking or biking, leading to situations like the one in which a Georgia woman was blamed when a driver struck and killed her 4-year-old son while they were trying to walk across a dangerous street.) But by and large, we manage to navigate intersections peacefully, even though we often don’t come to a complete stop.

So when do I get yelled at, if not for stop sign violations? Another part of riding predictably and safely means “taking the lane” — riding right down the middle whenever possible, and merging right to let faster traffic pass whenever that is safe and necessary. But that’s when I get yelled at and swerved around. That is when I get lectured while stopped at a stoplight about “all you” cyclists or sworn at and told to get on the sidewalk.

It’s understandable — these drivers have learned to expect cyclists to ride unsafely, hugging the line of parked cars, in danger of being “doored” whenever not swerving unpredictably to the right at intersections. Or they expect us to be on the sidewalk — the least safe place you can possibly ride a bike, and in many places illegal.

That’s right — despite my crimes (well, technically they’re misdemeanors), I only seem to cause a PR problem for cycling when I am behaving with perfect, obnoxious compliance with both the letter and the spirit of the law.

Yet there’s a persistent meme out there, spread by bike advocates and bike haters alike, that we two-wheeled travelers need to earn our right to the road by absolute adherence to stop sign laws. This is smoke and mirrors. What we really need are streets that bring out the best in us — streets that are slow and safe enough that we can intelligently negotiate our interactions in traffic with each other.

We’re not only capable of yielding to each other in a polite, safe, and orderly way that happens to be illegal, we already do it every day.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-25-dont-hate-me-because-im-a-smart-biker/feed/0maddriver2_flickr_maddrivers_carousel.jpgMad driver.The fashionable cyclist: Why let a little rain get you down?http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-14-the-fashionable-bicyclist-why-let-a-little-rain-get-you-down/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-14-the-fashionable-bicyclist-why-let-a-little-rain-get-you-down/#respondFri, 14 Oct 2011 18:02:16 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-10-14-the-fashionable-bicyclist-why-let-a-little-rain-get-you-down/]]>Photo: Madame de PeLast Friday, it was raining lightly, but that didn’t stop my friend Meghan Sinnott from riding her bike up to the coffee shop where we were meeting at 8 a.m. She arrived looking professional and perfectly put together in a skirt, blazer, and wool jacket.

This is typical of Meghan, a proud non-driver whose job as a social worker requires her to look presentable every day. So her appearance didn’t really register until she revealed she’d just spent the night in a damp park downtown with the Occupy Portland protesters. “I came straight here,” she said matter-of-factly.

What really made my jaw drop, though, was realizing after we’d parted ways that she didn’t even have a raincoat with her.

A few days later, I demanded that she tell me her secrets. She obliged. Here are Meghan’s expert kung fu wardrobe tips for those of you who want to stay fashionable — or at least workplace-presentable — while riding in the rain.

First and foremost, Meghan says, “suck it up and get some fenders.” She’s right. Far worse than any downpour is the rain and road muck that your tires heave up onto your legs, face, and back as you ride — not to mention into the face of anyone unlucky enough to find themselves riding behind you.

Planning your wardrobe is just as important. Judicious investments are key. Wearing technical rain gear can mean getting just as damp from sweat as you would from a light rain, but it can save you from getting drenched in a downpour. Here are Meghan’s suggestions as you find that wardrobe balance:

Wear black. Or brown. Or dark colors and patterns. Black bottoms don’t show rain and mud and a black top doesn’t show sweat when you get overheated wearing a rain jacket.

Wear wool if you can. I love my wool tights. They’re not cheap, but you can get them in the off-season on sale, and they’re totally worth it. Guys, go for wool pants. They’re sexier than khakis anyway. Seriously.

Don’t ever wear cotton in the rain. You’ll regret it for hours. (The stuff takes forever to dry!) Even synthetics are better than cotton if you can’t or don’t wear wool.

If it’s truly pouring, I accept that I’m going to get wet and go bare legged. I wear shoes that dry quickly (like Crocs or Melissa brand shoes). I dry off MUCH quicker than everyone else! (If you decide to fight it, try some rainboots. I like the Tretorn ones because they’re lined, but you can get any ol’ boots and put some sealant on them and they’ll do the job.)

A tight cap under your helmet will sop up rain and keep water from trickling through your hair and down your face.

Invest in a good-lookin’ raincoat! Like the kind you’d wear to walk down the street. You don’t have to look like you’re mountaineering every day.

Once you’ve got the wardrobe, you need to maintain it. “When you get home at night, it’s totally worth hanging your stuff so that it dries properly,” Meghan says, and adds this gem for the olfactorily challenged: “If you’ve worn something for three months and you don’t think it stinks, you’re wrong. Wash it.”

A little TLC for your bike will also help keep you looking good. Nothing will keep your hands clean if you have to deal with a mid-commute chain malfunction. (Nothing, that is, but a pair of rubber gloves tucked away with your bike tools.) But you can prevent such mishaps by storing your bike inside and wiping and re-greasing your chain after riding in the rain.

I think Meghan was as surprised as I was by how much she knows about the subject. Years of experience will do that for you.

And that’s my biggest tip to would-be year-round bike commuters — whether you’re an office worker who has to show up for work looking pressed and starched or a student whose most urgent need is to keep a bag full of library books dry, your best bet for figuring out bicycling quandaries is to look around at what other people are doing. And then ask them about it.

I’ll leave you with this last bit of wisdom from Meghan: She says she always has bus fare with her, just in case it’s that kind of day and she doesn’t feel like swimming home.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-14-the-fashionable-bicyclist-why-let-a-little-rain-get-you-down/feed/0madamedepe2_website-carousel.jpgWoman with bike.Riding the crimson tide: bicycling when you have your periodhttp://grist.org/biking/2011-10-12-riding-the-crimson-tide/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-12-riding-the-crimson-tide/#respondWed, 12 Oct 2011 18:10:49 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-10-12-riding-the-crimson-tide/]]>For some, it’s hard to go with the flow and cycle during the cycle.Photo: OMARPHOTOWORLDAs someone who writes about gender and cycling, I get asked a lot — why don’t more women ride bikes? My answer is usually that sexism is the problem in general, and economic inequality and the division of unpaid labor in particular. There’s nothing essentially gendered about transportation choices.

But every month I get blindsided by the reminder that there is one issue that really is ours and ours alone.

Menstruation, while it’s something most women deal with for many years of their life, is hardly a singular, universal experience, though.

Many of the women I spoke with for this piece bike right through their periods with no problems. They were surprised that I was even asking. I was surprised that they were surprised. Clearly this is a topic we don’t talk about enough. When I pitched the story to Grist’s managing editor, Ted Alvarez, he loved the idea. “We like to publish edgy stories,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s that edgy to talk about having your period,” I responded. It’s an issue, after all, that half of us can relate to directly and the other half can only gain a better understanding of humanity by hearing about. But he has a point: For some reason it’s taboo to discuss menstruation in public.

So in the interest of getting the conversation started, I will tell you that for the past 21 years of my life, everything has slowed down to a crawl for two days a month. Heavy flow, exhaustion, hideous cramps, sore muscles, and a brain-sucking sense of doom mean that getting on a bike, much less off the couch, can be a real struggle. This is often when I do my best thinking and writing, but going anywhere is a pure drag.

Apparently I should listen to these signals, says Dr. Andrea Seiffertt, a health practitioner in Santa Barbara, Calif., who combines Western and Ayurvedic medicine:

Your cycle is when your body is purifying and “re-booting,” so taking it easy is the most important thing … While light exercise and movement makes things flow better and definitely helps with muscle cramping and aches, pushing against or ignoring your body’s messages to rest isn’t healthy. If possible I’d suggest public transport or carpool on those days, or if you work from home like I do, permission to chill more than a normal day.

While I heard from women who have similar experiences to mine, many other women I spoke with said that they have more energy than usual during the heaviest days of their periods and actively seek longer rides as a way to manage the discomfort of cramps and bloating.

“Definitely listen to your own body,” responds Seiffertt.

Some issues are more universally frustrating. “I have a white saddle,” says my friend Maria Schur, who works at a local bike shop and races bikes in her free time. “Sometimes it gets red.”

Schur is admirably unflappable, but for those of us who do most of our riding in street clothes rather than easily-changed Lycra, a lack of functional menstrual products can be a messy problem. Pads bunch and chafe — and reusable ones are worse than thin disposables. Tampons, for those unfazed by getting intimate with nasty toxins, can leak — and oh, that uncomfortable string.

Writer and bicycling mom Marion Rice voiced this frustration in an article a few years ago, and dozens of responses rolled in giving accolades to silicon cups for use by the menstruating pedalers of the world. The two widely available brands are the Diva Cup and the Keeper. Word to the wise: Several women said the bottom tabs of these cups can chafe unless they are cut short.

For every woman whose period poses a transportation problem — or at least a wake-up call — there seem to be several for whom it is just one more minor logistical detail when getting ready to ride out into the world.

One thing that is clear, though — we don’t talk about this stuff enough. And when we do, we all seem to learn something.

For Gristy reviews of sustainable options, check out this two-part series that you and your little friend will love:

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-12-riding-the-crimson-tide/feed/0redtide_flickr_OMARPHOTOWORLD-180x150.jpgWoman on red floor. Bicycles at warhttp://grist.org/biking/2011-10-11-bicycles-at-war/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-11-bicycles-at-war/#commentsTue, 11 Oct 2011 18:08:11 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-10-11-bicycles-at-war/]]>Photo: MontagueTwo summers ago, I stood in the grass next to my bike, watching a tall, muscly fellow demonstrate the moves he had been developing for self-defense using a bicycle. He called it Bikendo. We practiced quickly raising our front tires so the bikes stood vertically and we could use the wheels to keep distance between ourselves and our imaginary assailants. Then, as our attackers lunged at us, we stepped around the bikes and laid them on their backs, sending the bad guys into a slow motion crotch-plant over the chainring. Ouch.

It turns out that bicycles can take down bigger threats than a shadowy figure in a dark alley. “We perform well against the tanks,” explained one Swiss soldier, vexed at the imminent dismantling of his bicycle-mounted military unit.

But let me back up. Back in the 1880s, when two wheeled steeds with pneumatic tires were state-of-the-art technology, the military saw their usefulness in traveling quickly and silently over rugged terrain. Over the years, armies worldwide, from Allied to Axis, adopted such innovations as folding bicycles that could be conveniently strapped to your back or delivered via parachute behind enemy lines. Bicycles eventually replaced horses, even as they were in turn superseded by their motorized counterparts.

Italian bicycle troops during World War I.

Switzerland’s bicycle regiment lasted the longest. Begun in 1891, it was dismantled only a decade ago. This Bicycling Magazine video from the 1980s shows the Swiss troops in action. One soldier describes them as excellent for defending a small country — they’re cheaper than heavier vehicles and can move undetected at relatively high speeds: “At night, you can’t hear them.”

Bicycles were particularly effective because Switzerland is mountainous and forested — a singletrack riders’ paradise, but perhaps not as copacetic for maneuvering a tank or helicopter. And as any mountain bike enthusiast can imagine, the Swiss bicycle brigade seems to have been particularly good for morale.

The Swiss Army, though, hasn’t seen combat since World War II. Its sole purpose is militia-style defense of the country’s borders. It was in response to the 2001 news that the Swiss bicycle brigade would be abolished (it was finally phased out in 2003), that the soldier complained: “It is stupid. Over short distances we are very fast, much faster than the motorized units. We can be very discreet, we are well armed and we perform well against the tanks.”

Rumor has it, though, that the Dutch — already world-famous for their embrace of the bicycle for all conceivable transportation purposes — may be bringing bikes back into official military use. A photo in this slideshow (brace yourself for the soundtrack) shows Dutch troops in Uruzgan province in Afghanistan who have traded their armored vehicles for bicycles in some patrols more in the spirit of community policing than combat — in order to “make better contact with the population.” Dutch deployment in that country ended in late 2010 and with it, presumably, once again the modern military use of bicycles.

As bicycles become more mainstream in U.S. cities, it stands to reason that members of the military are embracing them in their personal lives. Its obvious benefits in cost, health, and flexibility may see bike transportation trickling back up into official operations.

The bicycle, though it’s increasingly branded with progressive politics, is after all only a machine, and its possibilities are starting to be seen all over again. New technologies, from carbon fiber to belt drives to electric assists, may be the pneumatic tires of their day, and — it’s only for us civilians to guess — may already be catching on as a new way to conduct ground warfare.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-11-bicycles-at-war/feed/2militarybike_montague_carousel.jpgMilitary bike.Bike image.Spokes Patrol: Bike cops out in force at Occupy Portlandhttp://grist.org/biking/2011-10-10-spokes-patrol-bike-cops-out-in-force-at-occupy-portland/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-10-spokes-patrol-bike-cops-out-in-force-at-occupy-portland/#respondMon, 10 Oct 2011 18:03:16 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-10-10-spokes-patrol-bike-cops-out-in-force-at-occupy-portland/]]>My hometown got in on the occupation on Thursday, as a few hundred people came out for an Occupy Portland march downtown. Last week, I wrote about the interplay between the Occupy Together movement in cities like New York and Chicago and the monthly bicycle rally, Critical Mass. The topic was on my mind as I headed down to the march, half expecting to find the same symbiotic relationship between people on two wheels and those on two feet. It was there — but not in the way I expected.

As I approached the heart of the protest, I saw bicycles — hundreds of them — locked to every railing, fence, and signpost available. People had arrived by bike, but the crowd was so tightly packed as to make bicycling through it impossible, and few rode bikes in the march that followed.

Several clusters of people stood by their bikes, ready to ride when the call to march came — but they all came with identical black Trek mountain bikes and sported the telltale black and yellow uniforms of Portland’s bicycle-mounted police squads.

Photo: Elly Blue

The bike police stood and sat in varying states of boredom and congeniality. One posed for photos with a baby. Occasionally, rally goers approached them with friendly words and smiles; others edged away with wary looks. As I photographed one assembly of officers with bikes, a protester said to me quietly “good work.” Perhaps he was thinking that I was, like many others, there to document any potential police malfeasance.

In retrospect, I should not have been surprised by the presence of the badged bike brigade. In Portland, the tradition of Critical Mass, strong throughout the ’90s and early aughts, has faded from the vernacular of political action and organizing. Meanwhile, Portland’s police department has been honing the use of bicycles in policing peaceful protests — particularly marches on foot. It’s typical of any political action around here to see a cadre of bike officers waiting in the wings, ready to whip around the block to strategically channel the slowly marching crowd along predetermined routes.

The demise of Critical Mass and the renaissance in bicycle policing are related. Back in 2005, a group of Portland Critical Mass participants, including myself, met with police. We asked that they not send police along on the peaceful rides. They demurred. The compromise — or so it seemed at the time — was that bicycle-mounted officers would join the rides on the last Friday of the month, rather than the usual squad of motorcycle police, unapproachable behind their helmets.

As a result, I got a firsthand, up-close view of Portland Police learning the fine art of crowd control by bike, via trial and error. The technique that they finally stuck with was riding side by side with Critical Mass participants, demanding that we ride single file in the door zone, regardless of the hazardous presence of streetcar tracks. The requests weren’t legally binding, but because we were trying to work together, we tried.

But we weren’t in a mass anymore — and the ride quickly ceased to be any fun at all. It was as though your dad crashed your party and sat inches away from you all night, smiling in a friendly way while insisting that you dump out your beer. Eventually everyone moved on to Portland’s wealth of other bike events.

I’ve yet to see another bicycle event policed by pedal-powered riders. But these days, the bicycle cops are out in force at other events, with friendly smiles and a determined presupposition that your mug contains more than just root beer.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-10-spokes-patrol-bike-cops-out-in-force-at-occupy-portland/feed/0portland-police-flickr-elly-blue-180x150.jpgPortland police.Marching on two wheels: bikes, protest, and public spacehttp://grist.org/biking/2011-10-06-marching-on-two-wheels-bikes-protest-and-public-space/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-06-marching-on-two-wheels-bikes-protest-and-public-space/#respondThu, 06 Oct 2011 18:00:35 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-10-06-marching-on-two-wheels-bikes-protest-and-public-space/]]>Bikes can be effective tools in protests.Photo: Dan NguyenRecent weeks have seen the massive, multi-day protests spread from the original Occupy Wall Street encampment in downtown Manhattan to Boston, Chicago, Denver, and many other cities. But largely lost amid the headlines last Friday was another, related demonstration.

Like the final Friday of any other month for the last two decades, bicyclists rode out on Sept. 30 for the often-controversial Critical Mass group rides in cities throughout the world. Critical Mass has played into the progressive groundswell that led to protests like Occupy Wall Street. After years of practicing the art of civil protest atop their bikes, it’s no surprise that Critical Mass vets are now riding to the front lines, where two wheels often provide a tactical advantage over two feet.

The environmental group Times Up! — best known for its longstanding support of New York City’s embattled Critical Mass — has been using bicycle-mounted video cameras to document Occupy Wall Street, and they haul supplies in and out of the protestors’ encampment by making use of a bike’s capacity to carry heavy loads quickly through spaces too choked with people — or barricades — to drive. Logistical support for the encampment is “easier to do on a bicycle,” one organizer told the Village Voice.

Many of these protesters are rediscovering that bicycles are effective tools not just for logistical support, but also for taking over large public spaces. This is particularly true in leaderless demonstrations such as Critical Mass and Occupy Wall Street, where participants are encouraged to bring their own diverse motivations to bear, whether out of protest, celebration, curiosity, or specific issues and demands.

For starters, as any urban cyclist knows, on dense, congested city streets, you’re much quicker and more maneuverable on a bicycle than you are when confined to walking or a lumbering automobile. This is one reason bikes have historically played a role in military and police operations. (Keep an eye on the Swiss — they’ve obviously got something up their sleeves.)

But what works for the cops also works for demonstrators: On two wheels, you’re a moving target. And a group of cyclists can ride together as a pack, then break apart, darting down alleys and regrouping later, filling as much or as little space as is available. I experienced this riding with New York City’s Critical Mass in 2005. Despite a fleet of police scooters, SUVs, and even a helicopter, most riders were able to avoid apprehension thanks to our ability to split up and flit through narrow spaces between buildings and lanes of traffic.

That’s not to say protesting cyclists are invincible. Police in large cities are now trained to control and break up large groups of people on bicycles, often turning the rides into fragmented cat and mouse chases. Many Critical Mass riders have been detained, arrested, and caught up in prolonged legal battles. The most infamous case came during the police response to the Critical Mass ride that coincided with the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. Justice comes, but slowly: Seven years later, the resulting legal battles are just wrapping up, with most decided or settled in favor of the bicyclists.

Still, bipedal activists have been likewise honing their protest skills in support of cyclists. Videos of last week’s Critical Mass rides in Chicago and New York City show cyclists in standoffs with police. But marchers, who’d reportedly gotten word of the impasse via cell phone, joined forces with the riders and by sheer, shouting numbers were able to tip the balance. In these cases, it was the police who dispersed.

Critical Mass also helped prime the media to cover progressive protest issues, according to the New York Observer:

Video footage of the Friday night group rides was crucial in 2008, when it served as proof that the cyclist Christopher Long, who had been charged with assault, was in fact a victim of police brutality. NYPD later paid a $965,000 settlement to cyclists who were wrongly arrested … With a viral video and a shamed cop, the obscure social event for environmentalists and DIY kids [Critical Mass] became front page local news. Now, it’s a launch pad for bigger targets. “We’ve been using the monthly Critical Mass rides to train media warriors,” said [Vlad Teichberg, a veteran of the rides who has been helping with the live video stream of the Wall Street demonstrations.]

And if every protest is a street party of sorts, bikes can help keep that party alive. Late last Friday night, Times Up! members pedaled their bicycle-mounted sound system to the vicinity of the Wall Street protest and hosted a thumping, costumed sidewalk dance party that lasted into the wee hours of the morning, moving a few blocks each time police scrutiny became uncomfortable.

Just as we’re seeing bicycles play an increased role in coping with the aftermath of disasters such as earthquakes and tornadoes, as more people ride we’ll doubtless see two-wheeled transportation figure more prominently in every area of civic life — from celebration to protest to the gray areas in between. Just don’t be surprised if you see police on two wheels next time, too.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-10-06-marching-on-two-wheels-bikes-protest-and-public-space/feed/0wallstreetbike1_dannguyen_flickr-180x150.jpgwall street bike protesterDinner & Bikes Tour: The best and the worsthttp://grist.org/biking/2011-10-03-the-bike-revolution-is-on-best-and-worst-the-dinner-bikes-tour/
Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:21:11 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-10-03-the-bike-revolution-is-on-best-and-worst-the-dinner-bikes-tour/]]>Elly Blue just finished a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

The great 2011 Dinner & Bikes tour is officially over. We got home this weekend and did our final event here in Portland. To wrap up, I’ve put together a Q&A — mostly questions that have been asked by others over the course of our tour, but since they’re not here to ask, I’m going all James Lipton, and interviewing myself.

First, to get a real taste of the tour — the people, the meals, the bikes — check out this movie Joe made:

Q.Are you really biking around the country with all that stuff?

A. No, we drove: three of us, a pop-up bookstore, and our luggage in a tiny rental car. I relearned a lot of things about cars, like how you have such limited visibility and how going 50 miles per hour can feel unbearably slow. And oh, the stress! But the bookstore justified it for me in the end. It was a delight to see people respond to it.

But then, some cities I that expected to be bike utopias have stalled out somewhere down the line. Santa Barbara in particular has a huge population of people who ride, but they just elected a city council that seems disinclined to fund any bicycle projects, and there’s even an anti-bike movement that seems to have some influence.

Q.Did you notice any bike economics trends on the ground?

A. One topic seemed to be on everyone’s mind: Parking. Bike corrals (on-street parking spaces that have been converted to bike racks) are on the verge of becoming mainstream. Bike parking is low-risk for politicians and planners. It doesn’t require huge changes in street design. Business owners are agitating for more because it translates directly into paying customers. I think bike parking is also appealing because it’s low cost and you can tap into creative funding streams, like arts money for sculptural racks.

Q.Best biking city?

A. The surprise standout for me was Tucson. I predict it’ll be the League of American Bicyclists’ pick for No. 1 bicycling city in the next three years. They’re doing it all, and they’re getting it right. Major streets have been triaged with bike lanes and the city is building a network of state-of-the-art bike boulevards. Meanwhile, the county is spending millions on a 55-mile network of connected bike trails that are, like the ones in Minneapolis, designed for transportation, with two lanes and a separated walking path — they’re even building a new bridge in one place so there isn’t a squeeze. And Tucson is blessed with an energetic bike culture that is extremely equity minded, from BICAS, the arts-focused bike project, to El Grupo, a road-riding group for Latino/a youth.

Q.Worst biking city?

A.Las Vegas, hands down. But people ride there anyway. Every day. That was one of the best parts of the trip — watching people faced with adverse riding conditions get on their bikes anyway. When they start riding in big groups, that’s how change happens.

Q.Best bike lane?

A. The best bike lanes weren’t lanes at all — they were the wide streets that make up the residential grid of Provo, Utah. On a Saturday afternoon, there were barely any cars.

Q.Worst bike lane?

A. The worst bike lanes also aren’t lanes — they’re “sharrows” (an amalgam of arrow and “share the road”). In theory, I like sharrows — they’re like a giant, cheap billboard for bicycling. They’re also a politically palatable alternative to making room on the road for a real bike lane. But it makes me wince when cities put them directly in the door zone, like they do in Sacramento, or — in most cities — on fast, high-traffic streets where drivers and bikers alike ignore them.

Q.What do you want to bring home to Portland?

A. The bike freeways in Minneapolis and Tucson, please. (I’m not going to call them trails or paths when they’re built properly like this.) And it would be great to see more of the can-do attitude that we found in Kansas.

Q.What next?

A. We’ll be going on a similar tour in April, starting in Kansas and heading east. Maybe we’ll stop in your town? Also, I’m working on a book about bicycling and the economy, based on the posts I’ve shared with you here as well as what I’ve learned from the places we stop on tour. But first things, first — I’ll continue writing about bikes here on Grist three times a week for your pleasure and inspiration. What do you want to read about?

]]>bike-rocks-tour-flickr-elly-blue-180x150.jpgKangaroo bikes and Bambi killers: Meet the cyclists of ‘Outdoorsia’http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-29-kangaroo-bikes-and-bambi-killers-meals-meet-wheels-in-outdoorsia/
Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:41:11 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-09-29-kangaroo-bikes-and-bambi-killers-meals-meet-wheels-in-outdoorsia/]]>Photo: Elly BlueElly Blue is on a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

Spearfish, S.D.: Last year, on the intergalactic Bikestravaganza tour, Joe and I were flabbergasted to discover a mutant bike culture thriving in this tiny city in the heart of the region a friend calls Outdoorsia. This year we couldn’t wait to come back.

The day before we were to arrive, driving into the sprawling motordom of nearby Rapid City, we spotted a guy on a tallbike merging with traffic on a major arterial street. We asked about it at our event that night and were met with shrugs. “It’s a frat thing,” speculated a buff young pedicab operator. “They make some of the guys ride them.”

Photo: Elly BlueBut minutes later, the tallbiker showed up. It was Mark Smith, one of the founders of the Spearfish bicycle collective we’d met last year. He had moved to Rapid City for college and brought his own piece of mutant bike culture with him.

The next day, back at the collective in Spearfish, we reminisced about the year before, when our event was preceded by handmade ice cream sodas and what was billed as a cruiser ride, but was in fact a parade through town featuring nearly a dozen mutant bikes: tall bikes, swing bikes. There was even a kangaroo bike — a Mad Max contraption on which the pedals were set adjacent to one another, rather than opposite, requiring the rider to pedal with both legs moving in parallel rotation, necessitating a hopping motion.

This year, the mutant bikes were mostly hibernating for the winter, as was the new bike-powered ice cream churn (sigh). But local ingenuity was apparent at every turn. A young farmer showed up with a juicer and a box of vegetables and produced pitchers full of frothy, blood-red juice. John Williams, our host at the collective this year, rode up on his tallbike and told us that the town is now rolling with retrodirect bikes — bikes with drive trains engineered to move forward while you pedal either forward or backward.

Cappy’s bike tree contraption.Photo: Elly BlueCappy, a jovial homesteader whose school bus we’d slept in the year before, updated us on his weird and wonderful projects: the waterwheel, which runs off of an irrigation ditch, now connects to a water tower; he’s also putting a green roof on the bike tree.

I’ve been struggling all month to articulate the connection between bikes and food — the two key ingredients of this great West-wide tour. We thought the combination of vegan cooking and bikes would be hard to explain to people. But throughout tour, our mutant contraption of a show has been embraced as a logical connection. Maybe that’s just because it’s dinner theater. But conscientiousness and social awareness about food and transportation seem to go together — though not always in the form of veganism.

As he gave us a tour of his DIY contraptions, Cappy unwittingly made the connection between food and bikes in the most unexpected way.

“I hope this doesn’t offend you,” he said, jerking his thumb back towards our vegan feast. Then he told us that he and another member of the collective plan to go deer hunting this winter — by bike.

“We’ll bring a trailer,” he said, rubbing his hands together and grinning.

]]>tallbike_stadium_flickr_ellyblue_carousel.jpgTall bike.Tall bikes.Green roof bike.Road hogs: Minneapolis cyclists don’t need to sharehttp://grist.org/biking/2011-09-28-road-hogs-minneapolis-cyclists-dont-need-to-share-theyve-got-the/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-28-road-hogs-minneapolis-cyclists-dont-need-to-share-theyve-got-the/#commentsThu, 29 Sep 2011 03:24:48 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-09-28-road-hogs-minneapolis-cyclists-dont-need-to-share-theyve-got-the/]]>The Minneapolis Greenway.Photo: Micah TaylorElly Blue is on a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

Minneapolis, Minn.: “Portland is just an avenue in Minneapolis” — or so says the sticker on the rear rack of the bike I brought with me on our Dinner & Bikes tour. The words are attributed to R.T. Rybak, mayor of Minneapolis, upon learning in 2010 that his city had stolen the crown of most bike friendly city in America from my hometown, Portland.

There is, in fact, a Portland Ave. in Minneapolis — and it even has a bike lane, albeit an awkward one. (Among other things, it’s on the left side of the street.) But I never understood the City of Lake’s appeal to cyclists.

I met Kling at a sort of freeway interchange of bike paths — the first indication that this city takes cycling seriously. We swooped down to the first trail, which runs below ground level in what used to be the city’s rail system. Our first stop, a short way down the path, required a double-take — a bunch of cafe tables and bike racks, most in use, arranged next to the path, below street level and some distance from the nearest auto access. They belonged to a bike shop that was doing bustling business on a Sunday afternoon and, next door, a coffee shop.

Minneapolis’s Greenway bike trail system was begun in the 1990s, I was told, but has been getting a makeover and an upgrade in the last several years. Here’s a quick flick just released by StreetFilms:

I’ve never been the biggest fan of riding on bike paths, especially ones shared with people walking, but Minneapolis is doing better than most with designing these trails: Most of the paths we rode were marked with lanes for bike travel in two directions, with a separate path for walking. It’s a bold standard, but the paths were so crowded that a passing lane on each side would have been handy. (Build it and they will come!)

King then showed me where the city was rebuilding an intersection where a cyclist had recently been killed, adding a large traffic median, effectively creating one narrow, slow lane in each direction with enough room mid-crossing to shelter a veritable bike fleet. Nearby, a car-free bridge crossed a major arterial road and two sets of railroad tracks.

We paused at the top so Kling could point out the previous crossing. “It wasn’t very fun,” she said. Now, on this arcing suspension bridge, an oasis of calm above the fray, bike traffic was steady that at times it felt almost congested.

There was a dreamlike quality to the whole ride. The paths were clearly marked, the paint was new, signage was thoughtful and useful. I asked Kling if one could get around everywhere without being on the road. “You can get between parts of the city,” she said.

A few people on Nice Ride bike share bikes zoomed past. I was in awe. Kling smiled. “I’m very happy with the progress this city is making,” she said, “but I can’t say I’m satisfied.”

There were some spots that were less idyllic. In Minnehaha Falls, a gorgeous park, the bike lane narrowed, the surface was older, the middle stripe disappeared. Pedestrians, inexperienced riders, and wobbly kids strayed into our lane. Tourists tooted by on four-seat, pedal-powered contraptions. It was the same old bike path experience I learned to hate years ago.

I thought about Portland’s narrow, badly marked bike paths and all the emphasis on educating users to ride safely and “share the path.” It’s a relic of the old way of treating paths as a shared recreation system, a strip of unmarked asphalt meant for poking and wandering along, not for getting anywhere. It’s dangerous.

But the bike freeway we had been on, the new Greenway network across Minneapolis, shows what happens when you treat bike paths as a transportation system. Here, you always know where to ride, what’s coming up, and what to expect from the path and each other.

Minneapolis’s greenways need more work, more space, and more separation between bikers and walkers, but they’re a hopeful sign of what can happen when we take bicycle transportation seriously.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-28-road-hogs-minneapolis-cyclists-dont-need-to-share-theyve-got-the/feed/3midtown-greenway-minneapolis-flickr-micah-taylor.jpgMidtown Greenway.Red means stop, except for bikers in Kansashttp://grist.org/biking/2011-09-26-red-means-stop-except-when-it-doesnt/
Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:47:53 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-09-26-red-means-stop-except-when-it-doesnt/]]>Elly Blue is on a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

Topeka, Kan.: “It’s OK to just go here,” said Meredith Fry as we pedaled up to a red light near Washburn University. She slowed down, looked both ways, and rode right through the red signal.

I put my foot down and looked around nervously before following her. We had just passed three police officers on bicycles — the last thing I needed was a traffic court date in Topeka next month.

And to tell the truth, I was a little shocked. Sure, I’ve seen plenty of people run red lights, but I was unprepared for such behavior from this mild-mannered biology student who happens to be the spitting image of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz (or at least, what I imagined she looked like when my parents read me the book when I was 4 years old).

But running that red light wasn’t such an un-Dorothy-like thing to do, according to Fry: “We have a ‘dead red’ law now.”

Thanks to a new traffic law, she said, as of July 1, if your bicycle doesn’t trigger a red light to change to green, you can use your judgment and go ahead through it.

I realized if it was true, this was huge news for cyclists. States around the country have been trying to pass laws allowing people on bicycles to yield at red lights and stop signs rather than adhering to stricter rules intended for heavier, faster cars. Nobody since Idaho in the early ’80s has managed it. (Another name for dead red laws is “Idaho stop” laws.) For whatever reason, bicycles are still too controversial, and advocates don’t have the clout and money to reshape the rules of the road to make sense for bikes.

But here in the Midwest, bicycles aren’t the only two-wheeled vehicles with a legislative agenda.

While in Topeka, I got to talking with local bike advocate Rebecca Martin. She’s a member of the Kaw Valley Bicycle Club, a group of roadies — recreational bike riders — who are shifting gears to become more of an advocacy organization. The club helped pass the law (one of its members happens to be a lobbyist) which includes a rule requiring drivers to give at least three feet of leeway when passing a cyclist.

But Kansas’s new dead red law, Marin said, was actually spearheaded by motorcycle advocates. The state’s motorcycle police officers came out in support of the law.

I was floored. Could Kansas have just passed an Idaho stop law, and done so totally under the radar? When Meredith Fry rolled safely and cautiously through that red light, was it really a legal maneuver?

The answer is a big maybe. It’s all in the legal language: The Kansas dead red law allows motorcycles and bicycles to continue through a red light if it doesn’t change in a “reasonable” amount of time — a vague measurement at best. For Fry, reasonable meant no time at all: She encountered this light every day and knew that there was no way for a biker to trigger it. Whether or not a police officer or a judge would agree is another question.

But until it’s worked out in court or the legislature, it seems that Kansas’s newest bike advocates have achieved what seasoned organizations in Oregon, Utah, and elsewhere have failed to do time and again: pass a functional Idaho stop law, at least as far as traffic lights are concerned, and do it entirely without raising a fuss.

As for the Kaw Valley Bicycle Club, Martin wrote to me later that they’ve kept busy riding during the summer, but as soon as winter hits the Midwest they’ll be having another planning meeting. “We need to turn our attention to publicizing the new laws and identifying other goals to work towards,” she wrote. “I’m excited about the future.”

]]>stop-go-sign-400w.jpgUrban revival puts butts in the (bike) seatshttp://grist.org/biking/2011-09-23-urban-revival-puts-butts-in-the-bike-seats/
Sat, 24 Sep 2011 01:56:43 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-09-23-urban-revival-puts-butts-in-the-bike-seats/]]>Getting ready for a sold-out Dinner & Bikes show in downtown TopekaPhoto: Elly BlueElly Blue is on a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

Topeka, Kan.: “Kansas is sneaky cool.” So says the friend we’re staying with in rural Kansas, about midway through our Dinner & Bikes tour. The state’s capitol, Topeka, certainly proves this to be true.

It’s obvious that at some point in recent decades, downtown Topeka was left for dead. Less obvious is that it’s now bouncing back. It’s doing so in a “sneaky,” quintessentially Kansan way — without any flashy showcasing, but with unyielding determination. And bikes are playing a quiet but starring role in the city’s renaissance.

The few rough characters we saw riding around downtown Topeka on bicycles on a Wednesday afternoon chose, understandably, to stick to the wide and even emptier sidewalks. But it apparently doesn’t take much to fill the streets with bikes. We were floored when the organizers of our event here told us they had sold 90 tickets. People came out of the woodwork from all walks of life to fill a vast, dusty former department store building that was saved from being turned into a parking lot when the founders of the nonprofit Topeka Community Cycle Project asked to rent it out.

For the past year and a half, Cycle Project volunteers have taught bike repair skills and provided bicycles to the community for free, work trade, or affordable prices. The project is right down the street from a homeless shelter, and there’s a strong transportation equity component to its work.

“A wide diversity of people volunteer,” said Meredith Fry, a biology student at Washburn University and one of the organizers of our event. “It really brings everyone from everywhere, and seeing people be able to work together is really great. I think it’s been a big change for the community.”

The Topeka Community Cycle Project saved this former department store from the wrecking ball.Photo: Elly BlueDowntown has long been seen as a bit of a wasteland. Many of those who could afford to leave fled to the suburbs. But thanks in part to the biking community, that’s changing.

“In the last two or three years, there’s been a whole change in mentality,” Fry said. “You have people coming downtown for an art walk, and you have a homeless shelter at the end of the road, and it’s like, yeah, you’re going to see them. You can’t hide them — you don’t want to hide them. We’re all people.”

The bike project “crosses so many different barriers,” Fry told me. “That’s why we charged only $5 for the tickets tonight.”

“Rethink Topeka” is the rallying cry around here of late. And it seems to be working. The city, like many we visited, is working with a consulting firm to develop a bike master plan, spearheaded by a bike-friendly city council member. We were given a draft of the new bike map and as I rode around I could almost see the future bike lanes on the downtown’s wide, one-way streets.

In three years, I predict that Topeka will be among the country’s most bike friendly small cities — and if the Cycle Project is any indication, bicycling will be available to everyone, not only those with money.

]]>350_bikechairs_flickr_ellyblue.jpgChairs.Store front.Blogs put bikes on a path to world dominationhttp://grist.org/biking/2011-09-21-bike-blogs-and-the-path-to-world-domination/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-21-bike-blogs-and-the-path-to-world-domination/#commentsWed, 21 Sep 2011 19:00:35 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-09-21-bike-blogs-and-the-path-to-world-domination/]]>Boulder blogger Sarai Snyder is the force behind Girl Bike Love.Photo: Michele ZebrowitzElly Blue is on a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

Boulder, Colo.: Sarai Snyder comes up to me after our recent Dinner & Bikes event and introduces herself as the proprietor of Girl Bike Love, a blog that covers bike news, culture, and gear with women in mind.We chat for a while about our writing and the specifics of our work. “Of course, the underlying goal,” she tells me, “is world bicycle domination.”

Need I be reminded? The question of how to achieve this is in the air everywhere my compatriots and I have stopped on this tour. And while there doesn’t seem to be one secret recipe for building a bike friendly city, blogs like Snyder’s are a key lever for pushing bicycle transportation past its tipping point.

San Diego’s bike blogger is Samantha Ollinger, the proprietor of BikeSD.org, which serves up news, features, editorials, and an events calendar. This year has marked a turning point for the city, Ollinger told me: “Last year, every time I saw someone on a bike, it was someone I knew. This year is different. I want to stop them and ask them what they’re doing.”

She believes her blog has had a role in the increase in ridership. She recently left her job as an accountant so that she can do more bike work. “I have grand visions for San Diego,” she said.

Her counterpart in Tucson is Mike McKisson, who founded TucsonVelo.com two years ago. When we first met, he introduced himself as “the Jonathan Maus of Tucson,” referring to the founder of BikePortland.org, which has been a media force in Oregon’s largest burg since 2005 and serves as inspiration for many other bike blogs. (Full disclosure: BikePortland.org is also my former employer.)

McKisson brings a sports nut’s obsessiveness to his work. He blogs in the hours before and after his day job as an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona’s journalism school. He’s built an all-encompassing site for the city’s bike goings-on — and there’s plenty to write about. I joined him on a bike ride and was wowed by the number of bike lanes on Tucson’s wide streets, the connected off-road bike trails, the growing system of bike boulevards, and the sheer number of people on the roads.

McKisson showed these off proudly, but like many of his fellow bike bloggers, he’s seen enough in other cities to be hungry for more. “We have all these bike lanes but only 2 percent ridership,” he said, and then launched into a detailed account of the city’s transportation funding politics.

McKisson says a big part of his work is simply letting people know about events and getting people to meetings. City officials track his blog as well: He recently reported on a botched repaving project that left the edges of the road broken and rippled. “I wrote about how the project had made the road worse for bikes,” he said, “and the city made the contractor go back and fix it.”

Provo’s most active bicycle advocates also run BikeProvo.org, which contains everything from calls to support a new bike lane to a long interview with a local cartoonist who publishes a mini-comic about bikes.

These blogs are more than just media outlets; they’re also community builders, and sometimes those communities stretch well beyond the city limits.

Back in Boulder, Sarai Snyder, a marketing professional who once ran a bike shop in northern Kentucky, writes for a national audience. She founded the Girl Bike Love blog two years ago as a side project. In the last six months, it has started to blow up. Now she’s looking to make it her full-time job and even add more writers to her team.

Like others of her ilk, Snyder is fairly bursting with plans and ideas. At one point during our conversation, she turns away briefly to talk to a board member of the local bike collective about the best day of the week to start a happy hour for women who bike. (They decide on Thursday.) She segues from this into an idea that seems to have just hit her — a monthly Twitter chat — before getting back to the blog talk.

“My goal,” she says, “is to give women enough information to walk into a bike shop and make educated decisions — not to tell them what to buy.”

And that’s what makes the bike blogs work: They take the energy and momentum of a small community and amplify it, empowering people not just to make good choices about what they buy — but also to put pressure on the government, traditional advocates, and individuals alike to always work harder for cyclists.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-21-bike-blogs-and-the-path-to-world-domination/feed/4Sarai_Snyder_breezer-180x150.jpgBlogger Sarai SnyderIn Utah, cyclists on a missionhttp://grist.org/biking/2011-09-20-in-utah-cyclists-with-a-mission/
Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:00:58 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-09-20-in-utah-cyclists-with-a-mission/]]>Bike polo in Provo, Utah.Photo: Elly BlueElly Blue is on a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

Provo, Utah: As is the case at most bike polo matches, the sidelines at this game in a bank parking lot are marked by clusters of cans and bottles. But in this town, where dozens of players and spectators meet two or three times a week, they’re not half-empty vessels of cheap beer; it’s root beer.

The youngest player, age 3, swings a miniature mallet decorated with stickers that proclaim “God loves me.” She expertly thwacks a tennis ball right between the hot pink wheels of her pedal-less Strider bike and then has to be prevented from chasing it onto the court.

Nestled at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, Provo is home to the widest streets and some of the worst air pollution in the nation. It’s the most politically conservative large city in the U.S., and 88 percent of its residents are members of the LDS church. Provo wouldn’t be any outsider’s first guess for an up-and-coming bicycle city.

But, as we discovered on a recent stop on our Dinner & Bikes tour, bikes are booming here. The city boasts a huge increase in ridership in the last few years, local businesses that are eager to embrace the transportation boom, a friendly city government that sees the sense in striping bike lanes, energetic and effective advocates, a thriving bicycle culture that seems to easily cross party lines and social divisions — and, since early this summer, a thriving polo scene.

It all seems too good to be true. What’s the catch? I turn away from the polo game and grill our host, Zac Whitmore, the young polo player’s dad. He works at a local bike shop and is one of the founders of the city’s bike advocacy group, the Provo Bicycle Committee.

“There are two obstacles,” he says. “One is weather. But that’s just perception, right?” This is a huge outdoor sports town, he explains, so everyone already has all the gear they need to ride through the winter.

The other impediment? “Infrastructure.” As in, they can’t seem to build it fast enough. Our hosts bemoan Provo’s lack of green lanes, bike boxes, and other infrastructure doodads that exist in great abundance in nearby Salt Lake City. “We don’t even have sharrows yet!” says Krysta Whitmore, Zac’s wife.

But all of these symbols of bike-friendliness are on the near horizon. The city has contracted with a company to write it a bike master plan. In the meantime, bike lanes have been going in with very little of the usual wrangling. It turns out that those extra-wide streets are an advantage: there’s plenty of room for everyone. Adding a bike lane is as simple as repainting the lines — paint and labor to redo one mile costs just $1,800 here, says Zac, while the national average is $5,000. “Pennies on the dollar, dude.”

Better than any amount of fancy infrastructure, though, Provo’s conditions are amazingly good for bicycling overall, including a grid of low-traffic streets, drivers who are almost cartoonishly polite, and a plethora of bike-friendly businesses.

It seems that this city in the heart of the Happy Valley, as Utahns know it, has simply never run aground on the big problem of bicycle transportation: politics. “Isn’t anyone against it?” I ask. Not really, Zac says. Even the city fathers just roll their eyes, like, “Okay, it’s the bike people again.”

When promoting bikes and bike infrastructure, Zac almost never mentions the environment. Instead, he pushes the economic case for bicycling, pretty much the same points I’m making on this tour — and made in my Bikenomics series for Grist.

Back at the Whitmores’ apartment that night, I’m perusing a wall full of bicycle-themed artwork and notice a hand-painted placard that reads “We fear the devil & love to pedal.”

“Is there a connection between bicycling and religion here?” I ask Zac.

“Yeah,” he says, “LDS missionaries ride bikes.”

“They don’t really think of them as religious,” says a family friend who’s dropped by to visit, panting after a long hilly ride.

“People don’t connect them,” Zac laughs. “But you have a lot of young men who have converting experiences to bicycles while on the mission. So we try to catch them when they come to BYU. We’re like, ‘Hey friend! Need some work?’ They’re used to passing out information and talking to people. It’s perfect.”

“OK,” I say, teasing him. “I’m going to write about how you have no problems here.”

“We have problems!” Krysta says.

“What are they?”

“Ummm….” Everyone laughs. “New people come in to the University and they don’t always know how to ride safely,” she says.

“But that’s an opportunity!” responds Zac.

I rest my case. Sit on the sidewalk in this town, and you can almost see the bicycle culture growing. Last week, a group of traffic engineers learned about the new bikeway guidelines from the National Association of City Transportation Officials; next week the city hosts its first ciclovia event, with Center Street opened up to biking and walking. In only a matter of days the first bike collective will open.

Winter’s coming, true, but Utahns are used to it. And the quickly growing cadre of polo enthusiasts has already found an underground parking garage, mysteriously unused, where they can carry on their thrice-weekly games.

]]>provopolo2.jpgBike polo in Provo, UtahPedal pushers: Is Critical Mass bad for bikers?http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-19-critical-condition/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-19-critical-condition/#commentsMon, 19 Sep 2011 18:10:09 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-09-19-critical-condition/]]>A scene from the June 2007 Critical Mass bike ride in Vancouver.Photo: Tavis FordElly Blue is on a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

Phoenix, Ariz.: I’m quizzing Nathan Leach, our host tonight on the Dinner & Bikes tour, about local bike culture. Leach is the main force behind the Rusty Spoke bicycle collective. He organizes the local version of Critical Mass, the monthly bike ride designed to claim a piece of the pavement for the human-powered set.

“Are there any other organized rides?” I ask. Not really, he says. There isn’t even a local bicycle advocacy organization, though one guy keeps trying to start one. Critical Mass is it. A few times they’ve had 100 riders, though, which he says is huge for Phoenix. Still, it’s barely a blip on the radar in this city of nearly 1.5 million.

Since its inception in San Francisco in 1992, Critical Mass has been the hardy seed of the bicycle movement. Even in the world’s least bike-friendly places, riders fulfill a vision of streets filled with bicycles. The event serves as an incubator for connections, leadership, and political pressure that have been the motivating force behind much of today’s bicycle movement.

But in many places, the ride has developed a reputation for whipping up hordes of violent and confrontational young men who yell at people and blow through red lights. Earlier this year, a motorist plowed through a crowd of cyclists at a Critical Mass ride in Porto Alegre, Brazil. And some of the most vehement detractors are bicycle advocates, who argue that the event does more harm than good.

In response to this less-than-sparkly reputation, San Diego cyclists started a ride called “Courteous Mass.” At Bike Party, a monthly ride in San Jose, Calif., that draws several thousand riders, participants are asked stop at every stop sign. One of Bike Party’s founders, a young schoolteacher named Jo, told us that organizers began breaking up the event into several smaller rides when the group became so large it was hard to work everyone through traffic lights. She hadn’t been as closely involved recently, but said she has been disappointed by Bike Party’s recent anti-Critical Mass tone. “Why dump on Critical Mass?” she said. “This wouldn’t exist without Critical Mass.”

And in some places, at least, Critical Mass has made a difference. One of the films Joe is showing on our tour is the trailer for a feature documentary on the topic called Aftermass: A Post-Critical Mass Portland. The trailer features a former city commissioner saying that Critical Mass was hugely influential in giving Portland’s bike-friendly leaders the political cover needed to start rolling out that city’s now-famous bike infrastructure.

But riders are still frustrated. Earlier on our tour in San Diego, we met Samantha Ollinger, the blogger behind BikeSD.org. She has written about why she thinks Critical Mass continues despite its increasingly bad reputation in that city:

“San Diego’s Regional Transportation Plan does call for increasing ridership, but without a concentrated effort to give the cyclists what they are demanding — real estate — cycling in San Diego will continue to be the domain of a select few. Thus, it is no wonder that cyclists continue to gather on a monthly basis to assert their right to be on the road demanding space that is repeatedly denied to them.” (Read the full post here.)

Ultimately, Critical Mass’s complete and utter loss of the PR war may be yet another contribution to the bicycle movement: It allows the bicycle advocates who denounce it to appear more sane. Which is great up to a point — until Critical Mass destructs under the weight of its negative public opinion.

In Phoenix, that seems a long way off. Too small to be unpopular, the local Critical Mass ride is slowly and quietly building a movement of excited and empowered grassroots bike leaders. When the angry editorials start to appear, we’ll know that the Phoenix bike movement has arrived.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-19-critical-condition/feed/1critical_mass_vancouver.jpgCritical MassCan bikes bring back the neighborhood bookstore?http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-15-can-bikes-bring-back-the-neighborhood-bookstore/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-15-can-bikes-bring-back-the-neighborhood-bookstore/#respondThu, 15 Sep 2011 18:13:38 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-09-15-can-bikes-bring-back-the-neighborhood-bookstore/]]>Santa Monica’s bike freeway was so packed last Fourth of July that the Coast Guard had to issue a travel advisory.Photo: Elly BlueElly Blue is on a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

Santa Monica, Calif.: Spend 10 minutes with Gary Kavanagh — a blogger, advocate, and ubiquitous presence in Santa Monica’s bike scene — and you’re apt to get an earful about the new light rail line and bike path being built into town, the new Bike Master Plan that the city council may soon approve, or the amount of public space in the city that is dedicated to car parking. But look at Kavanagh’s pictures from our latest Dinner & Bikes event on Saturday night, and you’ll mostly see shots of our merch table. Basically, it’s a traveling bookstore stocked with titles about bikes, urban gardening, and radical movements, as well as bike-themed stickers and t-shirts.

Santa Monica is rich in bike riders, bike lanes, bike dreams, and — perhaps most key — bike funding. But, as Kavanagh’s enthusiasm suggests, it is also a city without a decent bookstore.

Cynthia Rose, who organized the event on behalf of local bike advocacy powerhouse Santa Monica Spoke, sighed about the recent demise of an independent arts bookstore that closed when its rent skyrocketed. The Borders here closed when the mega company went bankrupt. All that remains are a few spiritual bookshops and one last, struggling chain store.

It’s a bleak landscape for book lovers, and our guests that night were obviously starved for the printed word. As soon as they began to arrive, the merch table was as mobbed as the bike path down by the beach was last Fourth of July weekend, when the Coast Guard had to issue its first bicycle travel advisory. The crowd of book and bike enthusiasts never let up, even during our program.

This paucity of places to buy books, especially the edgier nonfiction fare we stock, is hardly unique to Santa Monica, but it’s surprising to find in such a well-heeled place. It’s a sobering sign that wealth and grand bicycle visions cannot insulate a community from the troubles of a car-centric nation.

Small, independent bookstores have largely gone the way of the dodo, thanks to big-box bookstores that began a race to the bottom in the early 90s, chopping their prices beyond what even they could sustain. They ruined the party for everyone, including smaller rivals, customers, and ultimately themselves. These days, most Americans have to go online or get in a car in order to buy a book, and the money used to buy that book — and the gas burned to get to the store — flies straight out of their communities.

Suburban, big-box behemoths took out more than just bookstores: Mom-and-pop hardware stores, pharmacies, and restaurants have all seen their business crater. The process devastated the fabric of urban neighborhoods and the small businesses that hold them together. Bookstores were hit particularly hard because they sell luxury items whose tiny profit margins require moving low-priced units in huge numbers.

It’s a bummer of a story, but the natural consequence of giant chains collapsing under the weight of their own price cuts offers hope. The demand we found in Santa Monica for independent bookstores and underground publishers means it’s only a matter of time before someone rises to fill the space left after the big-box crash. It’s a trend that parallels the rise of the bicycle movement: As society and individuals stagger under the ever-escalating costs of building and maintaining roads, filling up our gas tanks, and suffering the health and social consequences of auto-centric suburbs, many of us have turned back to the simplicity of the bike.

You could say that cars killed the independent bookstore: They fell prey to the same nexus of industrial, financial, and political maneuvering that created our car-oriented landscape. But bicycling could help bring them back. Right now, it feels good to know our tiny rental car carries both bikes and the promise of a new iteration of urbanism — one where everyone can afford to both travel at will, sit, and read a good book.

Elly Blue is on a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

Las Vegas, Nev.: Later this week, the mammoth bicycle trade show Interbike will descend on a convention center here on the Las Vegas Strip. But less-than-badass cyclists are advised to stay inside: “Every single person in Vegas who rides a bike has been hit by a car,” says one of the handful of men who have gathered in a local coffee shop, all in various stages of sweatiness and bikester apparel.

He looks around for validation at the others who are here for our latest stop on the Dinner & Bikes Tour, a traveling road show/vegan chow fest aimed at spreading the word about the bike economy. The others nod and raise their hands in acknowledgment. One guy looks up briefly from his blackberry. “I haven’t,” he says. “But I know how to ride.”

Old town Las Vegas was built before cars took over the streets and the casinos — and roads around them — scaled up in an arms race of size and spectacle. The resulting sprawling mess is cobbled together out of massive buildings on giant blocks with giant roads criss-crossing them. Empty lots full of gravel abound.

Despite the vast amounts of space, anyone not in a car competes for too-narrow strips of sidewalks, on which most bicyclists ride and into which bus shelters are somehow shoehorned, along with boxes of pamphlets for the city’s ubiquitous “escort services.” It’s not uncommon to see someone riding a motorized wheelchair in the traffic lane, hugging the curb as cars pass fast and close.

The group tonight is small but enthusiastic, all young people, including Heather, the woman behind the counter, who asks where we’re from with the characteristic friendliness of Vegas locals.

It’s our first night without a single transportation nerd in the audience, and my usual questions draw blanks.

“Who can define ‘induced demand’?”

They wait expectantly.

“Have you seen Field of Dreams? If you build it, they will come?”

There are laughs and nods.

“It works with freeways as well as baseball fields,” I say. I talk about the economic cost of traffic congestion — the loss of productive hours and years of life while sitting in traffic.

The classic response to congestion is to build more roads, or widen existing ones. But this has proven time and again not to work. In fact, it’s counterproductive: When you invest in more roads, traffic increases. On the other hand, narrowing roads — or removing them — has the brain-bending effect of reducing car traffic and even improving its flow.

“The good news about induced demand,” I say, “is that it also works for bikes.” When you have bikeable roads, more people ride. And when more people ride, the roads become safer for everyone, including drivers.

Heather from the coffee shop lights up. “That happened when we got the racks at the shop,” she says. “I think more people ride there because we have them.” She contrasts this with the days when they had only sign poles on the street. “These two guys would park on the two poles” — she gestures to two other audience members — “and that would be it.”

Is there other bike parking in town? I ask. “There’s a rack at the library,” someone offers.

But Vegas is rich in parking for cars, and induced demand applies there, too. Finding on-street parking is never a problem, because you can park for free in most of the casinos’ giant air-conditioned parking structures. At an average cost of $16,000 per space, this structured parking is a huge private expenditure for what is in effect public infrastructure. It’s a parable of Vegas, the Trojan Horse of free services.

There is very little bike infrastructure here, on the other hand — or even streets that can be reasonably navigated by a solo rider. A few disconnected bike lanes were built, one or two blocks at a time, on quiet streets that don’t need them. There was once a bike lane on Tropicana, one of the main drags, all the way out to Red Rocks, Heather tells us. The lane was paved over when the road was expanded to add more car lanes.

“If you build bike culture, more people will ride, too,” I say hopefully. Vegas has this — one new group attracts 80 participants to its weekly night rides. But a woman at the back of the room raises her hand. She isn’t having it. “We need bike lanes here,” she says. “People won’t ride otherwise. It isn’t safe.”

She’s right. Vegas needs more than a temporary, if exuberant, bubble of safety around a defiant biweekly ride.

I can’t help but think of the Interbike show, which will soon descend on the Strip, as it does every year. It’s a jarring juxtaposition: the broken built environment on the outside and the manicured bike utopia on the inside.

The bike industry, like much else that comes to Vegas, is largely motivated by a combination of money and machismo that isn’t always economically rational or humane. The industry is starting to realize that there’s a market for bikes just for transportation, with a few bike makers investing heavily in advocacy. This is the rare exception, though, not the rule.

Vegas has willing bicyclists, but they need help to build a bikeable city. There’s a whole convention center full of potential allies there this week. How many are ready to look up and take notice?

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-13-what-comes-first-the-bike-lanes-or-the-bikes/feed/0bike-cars-vegas-elly-blue-180x150.jpgBike racks in VegasBikes find a way in San Josehttp://grist.org/biking/2011-09-08-bikes-find-a-way-in-san-jose/
Fri, 09 Sep 2011 20:00:30 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-09-08-bikes-find-a-way-in-san-jose/]]>A young cyclist in San Jose.Photo: Elly Blue

Elly Blue is on a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

San Jose, Calif.: We spent Wednesday night in San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley. This is the promised land of the tech startup, home to high-rise glass towers packed with nerdy white guys in collared shirts hunched over laptops writing code, cheek-to-cheek with staggering poverty, police brutality, and a giant suburban mess. The largest city in Northern California grew up fast, and isn’t known for bike-friendly streets. We quickly learned why.

We saw only a few people on bikes as we clumsily navigated a maze of four-lane arterials while looking for a grocery store. Several men decked out in Lycra and fluorescent yellow zoomed past. A shirtless guy whipped around the corner on the wrong side of the street. An older white woman in flowing earth tones with a basket on her bike stopped to stare. Young Latino men riding mountain bikes on the sidewalk gave us friendly nods as we cruised by. We’re a bit of a spectacle in our packed rental car piled with bikes, looking every bit like the vehicles we’ve seen emerging from Burning Man all week, except for the requisite thick coating of white dust.

Though it now has a population of over a million, San Jose started small. And it started bikey.

“We do have a velodrome here,” volunteered a man in the audience after the dead silence that greeted my question about the local bike economy. Diane Solomon, a local public radio personality, chimed in to explain that in the late 1800s, bikes were all the rage in this town.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Baseball,” she said. “It became the all-American pastime instead.”

More than sporting trends have changed in the past century. “This is a town of agriculture that’s sprung into being nothing but engineers,” said Carlos Babcock, who organized our event. I’d met “Carless Carlos” at the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland, Ore. in 2008. Since then, he’d worked for the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition and is now researching a book about carless transportation in the Bay Area. It takes him two and a half hours to get to the research library in Berkeley using transit, he said — over twice as long as it might take to drive, because there are no direct trains.

Babcock coordinates media relations for the Bike Party, a monthly nighttime ride that boasts 3,500 to 4,000 participants in summer months, he told me, and “in January when it’s raining, more like 300, just the core people.” I gaped at this number. He shrugged. Everything in San Jose seems larger than life, even its bike events. For example, with the help of a local toy shop owner and a city councilor, Babcock started a monthly Kidical Mass ride earlier this year, but he wanted to keep it small, so “it’s only 60 or 70 people so far.”

Monthly Bike Parties have been going on for four years, and now have expanded to cities all around the Bay so that there’s a ride in the area every weekend of the year. It’s a spin-off of Critical Mass, but with a twist. Instead of forming a unified, autonomous swarm of bicycles sweeping across the city, Bike Party riders stick to the right lane of multi-lane streets and stop to wait for red lights. As a result, riders get spread out over many miles, so there are several set regrouping points, often featuring DJs and costume theme parties. The dozen food trucks that follow the event and make bank at all the regrouping points add an economic element to the party.

Bike Party is clearly the core of San Jose’s organized bike culture. It’s used as an opportunity to network, to educate new riders about safe and legal riding practices, to ride safely en masse on streets that are more dangerous to navigate alone and during the day, and to get together and socialize in a sprawling city with a notoriously rough bar culture.

Access to bike culture, camaraderie, and leadership are clearly major benefits of the Bike Party. But, I wondered the next day, is it subject to the same class and cultural divisions that mark this city of contrasts?

San Jose’s gaping class divide is evident as much in the bike scene as anywhere. Our event was held at the Silicon Valley De-Bug, a community arts space that also houses the city’s main civil rights group, which mobilized thousands to march successfully for assembly line workers’ rights. When we arrived to set up, our pale skin and non-teenager status put us in a distinct minority, but by the time our event started the group that had assembled was mostly white, though there was a mix of ages and genders, including several families with young kids. “It was a lot of Bike Party people there,” said Jo, the young teacher and one of the Bike Party’s founders, in whose living room we’d slept that night.

I asked Jo what the demographic mix is on bikes in San Jose. It’s a lot of commuters, she said: There are people going to tech jobs, where showers and changing rooms encourage bicycling to work. Others commute to manual labor jobs, she said, and you often can tell they don’t have the same access to bicycle outreach and advocacy.

One potential way across this divide lies in the Bike Party’s approach to gender.

“Sometimes we call this place Man Jose,” said Babcock. The tech world consists largely of male-dominated professions — programmers and engineers. “You go to the coffee shop at 9 a.m. and it’s all white men on laptops, coding,” Babcock explained, pulling out his phone to prove the point with a photo. So, naturally, “Bike Party at first was very male-oriented. Then they started doing these ladies’ rides” every few months, resulting in more women participating in general but also taking on leadership roles. “As more women got into it you’re seeing a lot more of a mix.”

San Jose’s bike culture exists in the face of, if not despite, its car-centric backdrop. The status quo is strong and the scales aren’t exactly balanced — a planned freeway expansion project in the works, said Jo, is intended to serve weekend traffic to a giant upscale mall. But being on their own means that bicycle society is entirely what the people make of it — and it’s growing into a powerful civic force.

If the people demand it, San Jose could change gears to become a truly bicycle friendly city. If they work together across the wealth di
vide, it could be the first truly equitable one.

]]>san-jose-cyclist-elly-blue-180x150.jpgSan Jose cyclist.The case of the disappearing bike lanehttp://grist.org/biking/2011-09-08-the-case-of-the-disappearing-bike-lane/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-08-the-case-of-the-disappearing-bike-lane/#respondThu, 08 Sep 2011 19:26:08 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-09-08-the-case-of-the-disappearing-bike-lane/]]>Elly Blue is on a monthlong Dinner & Bikes tour around the western U.S., along with Portland bike filmmaker Joe Biel and traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. This is one of her thrice-weekly dispatches from the road about bicycle culture and economy. Read them all here.

Sacramento, Calif.: Nearly every night on tour, Joe plays a short movie of some guerilla traffic engineering in action.

As our event wound down in Sacramento, someone found me out back and said, “There’s a handmade bike lane here in town, out by the zoo.”

We headed out to pursue the lead on our way out of town. “It’s on a hill,” my confidant said. On a long drive down winding, sidewalk-free road through Land Park, we had plenty of false alarms as we passed badly faded, eroded, and re-striped bike lanes. But at the end of the road was a slight uphill, and as we got closer we could see the marks of a DIY paint job.

DIY bike lane in Sacramento.Photo: Elly BlueShort, white dashes faded fast and alternated with some splatters in a different temper that suggested that the lane had been retouched at some point. Despite its telltale irregularities, the lane had a remarkably even curve and standard width.

Perfectly decent official bike lanes, unmarred by the hazard of on-street parking, grace this road for most of its length. But every few blocks, the lane on one side or the other disappears and then returns again after the next intersection. The message is loud and clear: This road is for cars.

We looked at our unofficial lane for a while before it became clear. Without warning, the bike lane on this part of the road stopped midblock and petered out into dotted lines — the way they often do in California — a half block before the beginning of a center lane that had been added for the convenience of people in cars making a left turn (a common road treatment that detractors call the “suicide lane”). Then, as we approached the next intersection, it reappeared. In this portion of the block, there were three car lanes rather than two. To keep the bike lane, the car lane on this side would have been reduced to eight feet. Though this is not unheard of, especially when trying to control the speed of traffic, whoever originally designed this road had opted to give cars the extra leeway for speed and let anyone on a bike fend for themselves.

The bike lane painter had rectified this omission. Best of all, the vigilante paint-job worked: In our time there, a couple dozen cars went by, and only one encroached on the bike lane markings. Most gave the faded stripes several feet of respectful room.

I don’t know if our white-haired informant with the jovial smile was also the amateur engineer who installed the zoo’s bike lane, but I’m hoping it was. This wouldn’t be the first time on tour someone’s told us about their clandestine efforts to improve their city’s bike infrastructure, and it’s often the people you’d least expect.

There’s something heartening about such an act of decidedly constructive rather than destructive civil disobedience. Think of it as civic participation: Anyone who grows food in a vacant lot, paints a mural on an abandoned building, or yarn bombs a public space (like the person who knitted a rainbow-striped cozy on the Sacramento Bike Kitchen’s parking rack) takes an active step forward in making the places we live, work, and ride better. They exist as examples that we aren’t all asleep at the wheel — or at least a reminder that we don’t have to be.

San Francisco, Calif.: At the end of 2009, a judge partially lifted a then-three-year injunction on building any new bike infrastructure. Ten projects came out of the gate fast, including a green bike lane on Market Street, a batch of sharrows (“share the road arrows”) scattered across the city, and a wealth of bike parking springing up in on-street spaces and on sidewalk’s edges everywhere. As we drove into town, it was exciting to see it all happening. But despite outward appearances, we’d soon learn that San Francisco’s bike-friendly makeover might only be skin-deep.

The 20 people who turned out to discuss San Fran’s biking future first watched me as I went through my war-room routine, which this time consisted of me standing by a sheet stretched across the living room windows and pointing at pictures of freeways and bike parking, asking them: What are the external costs? What are the benefits?

Audiences so far have been most engaged in listing the benefits of bicycling. I’m usually able to suggest one or two ideas, but this transportation-savvy group (which included a transportation reporter and a city traffic engineer) covered most of them on their own. This was lucky, because this was my first run without notes. While I paused to think, and they’d fill in my gaps with solid ideas of their own. “Another external benefit of bicycling is it can help communities thrive economically — people can do their shopping locally without the incentives to drive to a big box store,” said Dave Snyder, head of the newly minted California Bicycle Coalition. Snyder had certainly done his homework: He’s just back from his own two-week tour of meeting with bike advocates around the state, and he’s now working on organizing the state’s first-ever bike summit this October.

San Francisco’s bike injunction lasted four years total, and famously paralyzed the building of any new bike infrastructure until an environmental impact statement was completed. The blockage was largely the effort of one citizen who wanted paperwork to prove that bikes weren’t slowing traffic and increasing pollution. After the environmental review was completed at the end of 2008, the city went ahead with some prominent new bikeways, including the green one on Market Street. (A judge fully lifted the injunction last year.)

Watching from Portland in 2009, we had high hopes for San Francisco to build four years’ worth of pent-up bike infrastructure all at once — maybe this was the city that could even surpass us in bike progress, we thought. Their plans are certainly impressive: The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has an ambitious vision in their Connecting the City campaign, which would edit a grid of north-south and east-west streets across the city to create a safe, comfortable network of bikeways across the peninsula.

But so far San Francisco has been all promise and little progress. I wondered if the build-out had stalled, and a woman in the audience confirmed that the process has been frustratingly slow. She suspected that the city was gunshy after the injunction, and reluctant to start planning and building when it could happen again. Nods around the room confirmed this suspicion. “Portland feels safe to ride in, and here it feels dangerous,” said another woman in the audience who has lived in both cities.

But a little perspective shows there’s hope yet for a bike utopia in SF. The next day we met a young man who said he was pretty sure he was the only bike rider in Daly City, a South Bay suburb. He described riding in his own city as a nightmare, and riding in San Francisco as a dream. “They have new bike lanes cropping up every week,” he said, eyes lit with enthusiasm.

Despite the kudos from the burbs, most audience members agreed that internal changes are need to ensure San Francisco lives up to its image. They acknowledged San Francisco’s leadership excels at marketing its bike friendliness — but in reality, less than 1 percent of its transportation funding goes for bikes. “We need to make a real investment in this stuff,” said one audience member.

“But what do we do? How do we make that happen?” asked the first woman.

I’ll pose that question to you: When the people want bike infrastructure, but the government is timid or reluctant, what do we do?

Bike corrals are like supersized bike racks in a parking spot, usually on-street, which replace one or two car parking spaces with anywhere from four to 20 bike parking staples. They’re growing in popularity around the country (I wrote about them in a Bikenomics column a few months ago), but even I was surprised that bike advocates here had read about it and gotten excited.

So at 8 a.m., with coffee and local strawberries in hand, we went for a walk around tiny, touristy downtown Nevada City with a delegation of transportation advocates, the city manager, and a traffic engineer from the next town over.

We started out in the public parking lot outside the APPLE Center, a nonprofit sustainability resource center. “I’d like to have a bike corral here,” said the center’s director, Mali Dyck, indicating the parking spot near the door. It’s a little embarrassing, she says with a laugh, to have a sustainability resource center with no bike parking.

Two in our group showed up by bike; they leaned their rides up against lamp posts on the sidewalk right outside, for lack of better options. “I’ve traveled all over the country,” said Rich Looney, the chair of the Alliance for People Powered Transportation (APPT) board, “and one thing I’ve noticed is people want to park their bikes right where they’re going.” APPT is the county’s bike advocacy organization, and they’re in the thick of figuring out how to make the county’s economy resilient in the face of rising energy costs. Tourism and agriculture are the big local industries and both are affected by the skyrocketing cost of gas.

APPT has seized on bike corrals as an affordable and politically feasible way to improve bike infrastructure and attract bicyclists along with the extra revenue that extra parking brings. But they weren’t quite sure where to start.

The new pocket park.Photo: Elly BlueBut we learned a few minutes later that sustainability-minded Nevada City has been going full speed ahead. Two blocks away is the brand new boardwalk — which is actually a pocket park, modeled after the ones in San Francisco. It replaces an entire block of parking with a wooden deck with benches and planters. A local business owner and city councillor who spearheaded the project hosed the deck down, and told us that a bike corral should be installed right next to it any day. Tourists had been reluctant to walk down that street because of the number of people sitting on the sidewalk; so instead of kicking the sitters out, they built the park, and so far every day there’s a mix of people using it, getting along just fine. Our hosts assume we have these everywhere in Portland. When I tell them that we don’t, and that it’s very cutting edge, they’re surprised and pleased.

We visited another business where the owner, we’re told, wants to replace one of her parking spaces with a bike corral. We go poke around, and the city manager explains that while it might be possible to make a variance to parking requirements so she could refit a parking spot to accommodate bikes, business owners usually don’t want to give up car parking and the revenue that comes with it.

Then the business owner came outside to explain that she wants to put a combination of bicycle and motorcycle parking in the space on the end, next to a concrete wall. It’s a safety concern, she explains — there have been several near misses with people backing their cars out of that spot and not being able to see people who are walking — in one case, a running toddler — down the street. But when she called the city about the idea, they said they couldn’t afford to lose the tax revenue from the parking space. $4,000 a year was the figure they gave her. The city manager is agreeable. “Well, just send a letter to me,” he says. “And draw up a schematic.” The owner beams. So does Looney. “How do we make this happen more often,” he asks?

As we were talking, someone on a bike rolled up — the first I’d seen all morning. It was a woman who had been at our event the night before. We waved and she waved back. Then, lacking bike parking, she carefully leaned her bike against the freshly painted exterior of the coffee shop across the street and went inside. We all started laughing. “We didn’t arrange that with her in advance,” Rich said. “I swear.”

It was a hopeful morning: Nevada City isn’t particularly bike-friendly yet, but they have all the ingredients. The challenges in this town are typical of rural areas: winding country roads with no shoulders and no room for bike lanes, lots of tourists who might not know they need to watch out on blind curves. But they have a lot going for them, too, including a growing population of dedicated daily riders, a bike-friendly city council and city manager. There’s a strong advocacy group that’s excited to find creative solutions-like bike corrals and uphill-only bike lanes, and new, young blood in the form of a bike collective in the process of forming.

Most of all, though, bicycling doesn’t seem to be politically polarized here (at least not yet, the cynical part of me wants to say). But perhaps Nevada City’s lack of any bike-friendly infrastructure means they won’t have to go through the growing pains and political drama of reinventing the wheels of broken bike infrastructure. If they succeed, they’ll really be a bike-friendly town to watch.

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-09-04-corralling-bike-fever-in-nevada-city/feed/0bike-corral-portland-flickr-greg-raisman.jpgBike corral.The Nevada City pocket park.Dinner (and bikes) are served: The tour beginshttp://grist.org/biking/2011-08-30-dinner-and-bikes-are-served-the-tour-begins/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-08-30-dinner-and-bikes-are-served-the-tour-begins/#respondTue, 30 Aug 2011 18:00:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-08-30-dinner-and-bikes-are-served-the-tour-begins/]]>Our crew.For the month of September, I’ll be traveling around the western U.S. as part of the Dinner & Bikes Tour, talking and learning about the bike economy in places as far-flung as Tucson, Ariz. and Spearfish, S.D.

I’ll be blogging here about the bicycle economy and culture in the places we visit along the way.

From San Jose’s booming Bike Party scene to the quiet but quick expansion of the bikeway network in Reno, Nev., there will be a lot that residents of any city — including my own famously bike-friendly town of Portland, Ore. — can learn about how to make sure bicycling is an accessible and equitable option.

My compatriots in this endeavor are bike activist, publisher, and filmmaker (and my partner in life as well as in bicycling) Joe Biel, and world famous vegan chef Joshua Ploeg (the word on the street is someone’s conspiring to give him a reality TV show, so look out).

We’ll have books and zines for sale, serve delicious food, and hopefully spark some good conversations about our favorite topic: bikes! If we’re coming to your town, please join us!

Last year, Joe and I did a similar tour, and he made a little movie about it. Enjoy:

“The irony of the situation,” she told me in an email, “was ridiculous.”

The relationship between bicycling and health — and driving and ill-health — has been demonstrated many times over. The promotion of bicycling and bicycle-friendly streets has become integral to a number of high-profile public health efforts aimed at mitigating what is widely termed to be an American “obesity epidemic.”

Lincoln, a graduate student in Portland, Ore., rejects the term “obesity,” along with the negative stereotypes and focus on weight loss that come with it, and prefers to say “bigger bodied” or, though she says many don’t understand it, “fat.”

She’s just starting to ride again after an injury forced a long hiatus, but in the past she’s been used to riding 20 to 30 hilly miles a day for transportation and fun. “My body has always been fat,” she said, “but I was really fit and healthy, with all the biking I did. I chose self acceptance as a way to allow myself to be myself without shaming my body.”

Bicycle transportation, despite its importance to anti-obesity campaigns, isn’t necessarily a recipe for weight loss. It is, however, exactly what public health advocates should be promoting instead: An excellent way to get and stay healthy, no matter what your body type.

The irony is that body weight — and the cultural baggage that comes with it — can be a barrier to getting on a bike. “Any exercise can be difficult to get started, and unfortunately fat people face obstacles with judgment, finding a bike that works for them and proper clothing for biking,” Lincoln said.

Despite this, it can be done. And it can be amazing.

Developing a good relationship with someone at a bike shop helps. Lincoln “never felt comfortable in most bike shops, since I felt judged, or they assumed I was just getting started in biking and treated me like a moron.” She finally found a shop where the owner was “really friendly, welcoming, and helpful.”

You don’t need a special bike or components. Really. Many bike shop employees will try to steer bigger-bodied customers towards hybrids. That might be what you want — a slower, slightly more upright ride that isn’t necessarily built to put a lot of miles on — but it might not. Try out a range of bikes before making your decision. If you’re concerned about a bike being sturdy, look at mountain bikes and touring bikes — they’re built to get you up hills and take a beating.

Investing in a set of strong wheels will help you avoid the common peril of heavy riders, kid-haulers, and cargo bikers alike — the broken spokes. Likewise, if you always feel in danger of tipping over while riding, try a set of wider tires — the less tread on them, the faster you’ll be able to go.

Beware the allure of the wide seat with lots of padding. If you sit bolt upright on your bike — say it’s a cruiser, Dutch bike, or recumbent — then a wide seat makes sense. Otherwise, it’s your sitz bones that rest on the seat, not your fundament, and having a lot of extra squishy stuff down there can lead to all kinds of discomfort.

You do need your bike to fit you well so you don’t strain your back and knees. A centimeter in seat height can make all the difference between bliss and knee pain. Check out some basic tips on choosing and adjusting a bike yourself.

Some of the best-dressed people I see riding around Portland are larger women. Someone finally clued me in — it’s because bike gear can be nearly impossible to find if you’re a woman over size 14 or so. There are some online outlets, like the woman-owned Team Estrogen, that carry plus sizes, but the selection may be less than amazing. A friend’s sister chooses to ride slowly and wear a classy wool jacket to keep the rain off because she can’t find a high-tech one that fits. Lincoln says she had to make her own rain pants because the only plus sizes were fit for men.

But don’t despair. There are affordable, one-size-fits-all rain accessories for fancy technical rain gear: a poncho and a good set of fenders for your bike.

I asked Lincoln for more tips. “My advice for fat folks just getting started is to find support and just go for it,” she said. “Support can be friends or family who are understanding, or others who have been in the same situation.”

For exactly that reason, she helped create a Portland-oriented Facebook group called Big Butt Biking, which plans group rides and regular social get-togethers to support each other and share their experience and knowledge.

People still sometimes yell at Lincoln out of cars, but she doesn’t let it get to her: “There is a lot of empowerment in the freedom of a bike and not allowing others to get you down.”

]]>http://grist.org/biking/2011-08-15-living-large-and-healthy-on-the-bike/feed/0fat-tire-brian-wilkins-flickr-500.jpgFat tire signBetter than air conditioning: Tips for biking through the heat wavehttp://grist.org/biking/2011-08-01-tips-for-biking-through-the-summer-heat/
Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:59:31 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-08-01-tips-for-biking-through-the-summer-heat/]]>There are lots of ways to stay cool on your bike.Photo: bitchcakesnyThe heat wave is gearing up for another blast, throwing temperatures over 100 at residents across North America.

For many, the heat is a deterrent for getting on a bike. It doesn’t have to be.

You can bike happily through even the hottest days of the year if you think of bicycling not as an athletic endeavor, but as a leisurely way to get around that includes free, green air conditioning.

I’m in the Pacific Northwest, where our climate is increasingly rainy. But don’t resent me — I’ve weathered some heat waves in my time, and biked through most of them. Here’s what I’ve learned about surviving — and thriving — the hottest days of summer by bike.

First things first

Turn off that air conditioning.

Or at least turn up the thermostat. Here’s why: If you’re always going back and forth between extremes of hot and cold, the heat will feel like an oppressive blast each time you step outside. But if you give your body a chance to actually acclimate — it takes a couple of weeks — you’ll be much more comfortable, outdoors and in. For acclimating to the heat, it helps to be on the fit side, which is another reason to keep on biking.

What to wear

There are two schools of thought on how much of your body to cover. Many people prefer to strip down to as little as possible — (though you probably should avoid taking it too far).

I’ve written about adjusting your everyday wardrobe for daily summer bike riding elsewhere. The essential rule, though, is that lightweight natural fibers are more comfortable, while lightweight polyester prints won’t show sweat. If you need to look professional at the end of your ride, a spit bath and change of clothes is the ticket.

A cycling cap, the identifying marker of bike messengers, racers, and their imitators, can be a life saver. It’ll keep the sun off your head, keep the sweat off your face, and shade your eyes. Another essential accessory is the bandana or scarf tied around your wrist to mop the sweat from your brow at stop lights.

Oh, and use sunblock. Lots of it. This ain’t your grandmother’s ozone layer.

Water

Before you set off for a long ride in the heat, drink a lot of water. Like a quart. You’ll sweat it all out as you ride. Drink slowly, and stop if it gets uncomfortable — yes, it is possible to drink too much water.

While you ride, and when you get off your bike, keep on drinking. But stick to room temperature tap water. Cold water and ice shock your system and are harder for your body to absorb.

Eating salty foods helps with water absorption. Alcohol, caffeine, soda, and juice, on the other hand, require a lot of water and energy for your body to process, so if you drink this stuff you’ll need to drink even more water along with them.

Another use for water is pouring it on yourself. You can get a similar effect more efficiently by soaking a bandana with cold water and tying it around your head under your helmet. Cooling down your head will help cool your entire body.

Timing

Timing is everything.

Leave yourself plenty of time. Heading out 15 minutes early can make the difference between a sweltering hustle that leaves you drenched and drained on the other end and a pleasant ride that generates an almost cooling breeze. The latter puts you in a far better mood than a similar trip by car and gives you a few minutes at the end to wash your face and catch your breath.

The coolest hours of the day fall around 4 a.m. to 7 a.m., while the evening commute tends to be the hottest time of the day. Plan accordingly. It’s a good idea to have a backup plan, like bus fare or a friend or cab you can call if you get partway home and start feeling rough — you don’t want to mess with heat stroke.

The hotter it is, the more aggressively and impatiently people tend to drive. This is another excellent argument for bicycling, but when you do, be extra careful out there at the hottest times of day.

Outfitting your bike for the heat

Now is a good time to make sure your bike is well tuned up so you aren’t working any harder than you have to. Top off your tire pressure every few days (if you don’t have a floor pump, drop by a bike shop and use theirs). Make sure your chain is greased and your gears well adjusted so you can use all of them.

A heat wave is also a good incentive to take that load off your back. Equip your bike with a rear rack and panniers (you can make your own out of buckets for next to nothing) or a front basket to carry your bag in. You’ll sweat less and swear less.

•••

Hot weather biking isn’t for everyone. But if you put some thought into how you dress, take it slow, and always have water and snacks on hand, you can do it — and you’ll probably even love it.

]]>fire-hydrant-bike-bitchcakesny-flickr-500.jpgRiding through fire hydrantThe Bike Factor: Disability and the ability to ride a bicyclehttp://grist.org/biking/2011-07-18-the-bike-factor-disability-and-the-ability-to-ride-a-bicycle/
http://grist.org/biking/2011-07-18-the-bike-factor-disability-and-the-ability-to-ride-a-bicycle/#commentsMon, 18 Jul 2011 22:33:30 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-07-18-the-bike-factor-disability-and-the-ability-to-ride-a-bicycle/]]>Cyndi Sutter’s trike helped her to feel free again after a brain injury.Photo: Elly BluePeople with disabilities need cars to get around.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told this. At events, in blog comments, from friends and strangers in conversation. Sometimes I hear it from people who have direct experience with disability. More often the point is produced as part of an argument against making cities bike-friendly.

For many people with disabilities, cars don’t just symbolize independence and freedom, they make those things possible. But this isn’t universally true, and it isn’t always so simple.

Disability advocates often speak of disabilities as a social construct, defined in part by the reality of a missing limb or a head injury, but even more so by the environment and tools available. For instance, in places where glasses are available, being moderately nearsighted isn’t considered a disability; where they’re hard to come by, it’s a whole different story.

Similarly, transportation options, or lack of them, play a major role in shaping what is a disability and what isn’t. If you live in a neighborhood without stores or sidewalks or decent places to walk and you have bad knees, access to a car can indeed be a game changer. But for some people, a bicycle can be the factor that makes life manageable.

Kris Warloe, a semi-retired mathematics teacher in Corvallis, Ore., has been riding a bicycle for transportation since he was 6-years-old. At age 12, he lost his left leg to a crash with a drunk driver. Two years later, he was back on the bike and never stopped. Now 67, he’s still riding about 40 miles a week, as well as swimming daily and skiing through the winter.

He rides a diamond-frame bicycle without special modification. “The hard part is when you put the artificial foot on the pedal,” he said. “You have to keep looking to make sure it’s still on the pedal. It keeps slipping off.” He used to clip the foot into the left pedal. “That worked great until I was pedaling up a steep hill and a gust of wind blew me to the left.”

There are other kinds of events that change the way you use transportation. Not being able to drive in a world built for cars is the universal reality of aging — and one of the major reasons that old age can often seem like a disability in itself — but can happen suddenly to anyone.

In 2004, Cyndi Sutter survived a traumatic brain injury caused by a rare congenital disorder. Before her injury she had been a daily bike rider. After the long process of learning to walk again, she found that her driver’s license had been canceled and her two-wheeler no longer felt comfortable to ride around Minneapolis.

So in 2006, she went online and bought an upright, adult three-wheeler with a hefty cargo basket. “When I got it, I felt more free,” she said. “I could go to the library and not have to take the bus.” The trike also allowed her to cater events self-sufficiently, carry heavy supplies for volunteer gigs, and bring her dog along in the basket on trips down the city’s famous off-road bike paths.

But despite Minneapolis’s reputation as one of the country’s best cities for bicycling, Sutter found that after her injury car traffic was overwhelming. “I just felt safer on the bus. Even with my helmet and reflective gear,” the streets were too busy, even side streets. “Also, it’s kind of frustrating because my trike doesn’t go as fast as what I’m used to on my road bike.”

Sutter has recently moved to be closer to her family in the small town of Hutchinson, recently named the Best Small Town in Minnesota. It’s a far cry from Minneapolis. “I prefer to live in the city and close to the things that I need,” she told me. She thinks she’ll apply to get her license back in anticipation of winter. But “I’m so glad I’m out here and can ride my two-wheeler again — it’s a plus of living in a town of 14,000.”

Having a bicycle that works for you can make all the difference. There’s a whole movement, Adaptive Cycling, focused on reinventing the bicycle for people who need something other than the classic diamond frame.

Ten years ago on the Fourth of July, Bob Hudecek, a longtime bicycle advocate in northeastern Ohio, was hit by a car while riding. He sustained a spinal cord injury that left him with some feeling but very little movement from the chest down.

“I went eight years without doing much of anything,” he said. Then in 2008 he heard about a chance to try out a handcycle — a recumbent three-wheeler powered by hand-cranked pedals — during a clinic set up by the parks department.

“I didn’t even know those things existed,” he said.“And it was like — wow, this is where I need to be … It’s opened up a lot of doors.”

In the last year, Hudecek began participating in marathons along with other handcyclists. He and his wife have traveled around the country seeking opportunities to ride, from Critical Mass to greenway trails.

Handcycling “really has changed my life in a lot of different ways,” he said. “First and foremost it’s given my wife and me something we can do together and thoroughly enjoy. Second, it’s the health part of it.” And the fun.

I asked Warloe, the 67-year-old in Corvallis, to respond to the argument that promoting bicycling excludes people with disabilities. “As I look around at people my age, they’re either people who do things or they’re twice or three times the size of me,” he said. “It’s a no-brainer. Either you use it or you lose it. Even if you have some disability you should get out there and do something.”

Bicycling clearly isn’t just for the able-bodied (or, as a friend puts it, the temporarily able-bodied). The amazing thing isn’t so much that people with disabilities can ride bicycles, it’s the creativity and against-all-odds resourcefulness so many people show — disabled and otherwise — in getting on a bicycle as a way of taking control of their own mobility and well being, even in the most hostile environments. If anything is going to change our streets, it’s that.